School of Cultures, Languages and Area Studies

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Image of Isobel Elstob

Isobel Elstob

Assistant Professor in Art History, Faculty of Arts

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Biography

Prior to joining the University's Department of Cultural, Media, and Visual Studies as an Assistant Professor in 2018, I held roles as Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Visual Culture and Associate Research Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London, and Teaching Fellow in Art History and Theory at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL. In addition to my academic appointments, I have worked with commercial galleries in London, directed contemporary art engagement events and curated public-facing exhibitions.

Expertise Summary

I specialise in modern and contemporary art history and theory. My research examines how contemporary artists visualize the historical past in their work, including histories of science, colonialism, and enslavement, and deploy historical media such as taxidermy and traditional photography techniques. I am also interested in how literary and historiographic theories and frameworks, like intertextuality, narratology and metafiction, can be applied to the study and understanding of the visual arts.

My most recent book and exhibition projects, Reimag(in)ing the Victorians in Contemporary Art: Britain and Beyond | SpringerLink and Reimag(in)ing the Victorians - Lakeside Arts, Nottingham, explore the work of a range of contemporary artists including Yinka Shonibare, Mat Collishaw, Tessa Farmer, Dorothy Cross, Ingrid Pollard and Mark Dion across media including film, photography, installation and scupture.

I would welcome PhD proposals that relate to:

Neo-Victorian studies and the visual arts

Connections between literary and art theory

Histories of interactions between art and science

Contemporary art and memory studies

Modern and contemporary Black art histories

Histories of display and collections

Memberships and Board positions:

Editorial Advisory Board Journal of Historical Fictions

Academic Advisory Board Languages, Texts and Society

Advisory Board PoCo Page, Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée

Trustee, BACKLIT Gallery, Nottingham

Member, Association for Art History

Member, British Art Network

Teaching Summary

My teaching considers how visual artists respond to various socio-political context(s) in the modern and contemporary period. Several of my research interests inform my teaching approach, including… read more

Research Summary

My research explores how contemporary artists engage with marginalized, obscure or traumatic histories. Concerned with artists' formal approaches towards representing the past, my work applies… read more

My teaching considers how visual artists respond to various socio-political context(s) in the modern and contemporary period. Several of my research interests inform my teaching approach, including the interrogation of established forms of narrative, creative appropriations of methods from other disciplines - such as anthropology, physics and ethnography - histories of display, visual approaches to the construction (reconstruction and deconstruction) of race and histories of epistemology and science.

Courses and modules that I've taught include:

Science in Art: 1900 to the present (BA)

Black Art in a White Context: display, critique, and 'the Other' (BA)

Institutional Critique and the Critique of Institutions (BA)

Art and Science: from the Renaissance to the contemporary (BA)

The Power of Display (BA)

Visualizing Conflict (MA)

Visualizing the Victorians (MA)

Criticism and Display (MA)

Image and Identity (MA)

I am also involved in anti-racism and EDI work at the University through my role as EDI lead for the Department of Cultural, Media, and Visual Studies, School EDI Committee member, Race Equality Charter working group member, and coordinator of several initiatives that aim to help improve a sense of inclusivity for our Black, Asian, and other ethnically diverse student body. These include the introduction of a department-level Cultural Inclusivity Student Council and School-level Inclusivity Ambassadors, as well as their associated staff-student forums. I've also initiated student-led projects, such as a MyProfile platform, and partnered with BACKLIT Gallery, Nottingham, to create a student-led podcast focused on discussions of race, heritage, and the lived experiences of its participants in 2021 and the OUTCOME exhibition project in 2022. I am currently continuing this work in my role as School Director of EDI.

Current Research

My research explores how contemporary artists engage with marginalized, obscure or traumatic histories. Concerned with artists' formal approaches towards representing the past, my work applies literary and historiographic models, such as intertextuality, metafiction and narratology, to the study of a broad range of visual media including installation, performance, painting and photography.

My recent book Reimag(in)ing the Victorians in Contemporary Art: Britain and Beyond (Reimag(in)ing the Victorians in Contemporary Art: Britain and Beyond | SpringerLink) examines contemporary visual responses to and revivals of nineteenth-century technologies, crafts, collections and historical narratives. Focusing on works by artists including Mat Collishaw, Polly Morgan, Ingrid Pollard, Tessa Farmer, Mark Dion, Yinka Shonibare and Dorothy Cross, the study explores: artistic revivals of Victorian visual technologies, such as magic lanterns; the recent emergence of taxidermy as a contemporary medium; appropriations of historical forms of collecting, preservation and display; and visual re-presentations of marginalized and colonial histories.

This research was developed into the exhibition, Reimag(in)ing the Victorians (Reimag(in)ing the Victorians - Lakeside Arts, Nottingham), which combined contemporary work by artists including Sunil Gupta, Yinka Shonibare, Mark Dion and Sally Mann, with historical objects and images, including taxidermy, photographs by Margaret Cameron and Lady Clementina Hawarden, and illustrations by John James Audubon and Elizabeth Gould. Accompanied by a series of public engagement events, including tours and conversations with artists (The Return of the Fairies - Lakeside Arts, Nottingham), and part-funded by the Henry Moore Foundation, the exhibition also produced a curatorial collaboration with Nottingham College, whose photography students created images in response to its works for the exhibition, Hidden, Missing, Untold. Reimag(in)ing the Victorians (Nottingham College Photography Students' Showcase Their Work at Djanogly Lakeside Gallery | Nottingham College).

I am currently working on an edited collection derived from the international conference The Art of History (The Art of History, June 2024, University of Nottingham), which was funded by the Association for Art History and the Association for the Study of Modern Italy. The volume will include essays by academics, curators and artists based at the Polish Academy of Sciences, the University of Western Australia, the University of Fribourg and the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, among others, and covers topics including war and memorials, fascism and landscape, and autobiographical film.

Publications and Projects:

Elstob, I. (2023) 'Exhibition explores how the Victorians are being reimagined in contemporary art', The Conversation, December, 2023.

Elstob, I. (2023) Reimag(in)ing the Victorians in Contemporary Art: Britain and Beyond (Palgrave Macmillan). Available in harcopy and e-book format.

Exhibition. Reimag(in)ing the Victorians, Djanogly Art Gallery, Lakeside Arts, Nottingham (September 2023 - January 2024). Reviewed in:

- Studio International (Reimag(in)ing the Victorians in Contemporary Art)

- FAD Magazine (Review: Reimag(in)ing the Victorians at Djanogly Gallery - FAD Magazine).

Elstob, I. (2020) '"The Spinster" and her Jellyfish: Dorothy Cross's 'Medusae' and historiographical storytelling', Visual Studies. DOI: 10.1080/1472586X.2020.1803125.

Elstob, I. (2019). '"The End is the Beginning and Lies Far Ahead":Time and Textuality in African American Visualizations of the Historical Past, 1990-2000'. In L. Aje, & N. Gachon (Eds.), Traces and Memories of Slavery in the Atlantic World. Routledge.

Elstob, I (2018). 'Visual Metafictions: Mark Fairnington's Mantidae and Victorian Representations of the 'Real', Journal of Neo-Victorian Studies.

Elstob, I. (2017). 'The Artist-Historian': Victorian Natural History in the Work of Mark Dion, Journal of Victorian Culture. DOI: 10.1080/13555502.2017.1359657.

Selected conference, panel contributions, and gallery talks:

2023. Opening Lecture. 'The Present Past in Contemporary Art', Reimag(in)ing the Victorians exhibition private view, Lakeside Arts, Nottingham.

2023. Panel Discussion. ''Making a World of My Own': an evening of writing and experimentation', Being Human Festival, Nottingham Contemporary.

2022. Keynote. 'Remagining the Victorians: Visualizing the 19th Century in Contemporary Art', Revisioning the Past: The Artist/Designer as Historian, University of Portsmouth and University of Bristol

2022. Panel Discussion. Ghost Empire: British Colonial Laws and LGBTQ+ Rights, University of Nottingham

2021. Keynote. 'Visualizing the Past: Us, Them, Now, Then', Annual Postgraduate Symposium, The Courtauld

2021. 'Phantasmagoria in the Work of Mat Collishaw', Theatre and Visual Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century, University of Exeter

2020. 'Seeing is Believing: Victorian visual technologies in contemporary art', Illumination: Perspectives on the Way of Light, Birkbeck College, London

2019. 'Mapping the Historical Past: time, place, and trauma in Ingrid Pollard's Oceans Apart, 1989', International Conference for (Neo-)Victorian Studies, Birkbeck College, London

2017. 'Material Histories: Collage as medium in Kara Walker's picture series, 2001-2005', Bluecoat 300: Slavery and Philanthropy, Liverpool

2017. Panel Discussion. Recovering Nineteenth-Century Women in the Digital Context, Birkbeck Arts Week

2016. ''Intertemporal Intertexts in African American Visual Arts, 1990-2000', Traces and Memories of Slavery in the Atlantic World, Montpellier University, Montpellier

2015. 'The Historical Impulse: The Representation of History in Recent Visual Art', Nottingham, Visual Cultures Research Seminar, University of Nottingham

2014. 'Representations of Sublime Nature: The Ocean in the Work of Dorothy Cross', British Waters and Beyond, Royal West of England Academy, Bristol

2013. 'The Plain and Leafy Fact: The Artistic Practice of Mark Fairnington', Neo-Victorian Cultures, Liverpool John Moores, Liverpool

2013. 'Astronomy and Geology, those terrible Muses! Michelle's Stuart's and the Natural Sciences', Djanogly Art Gallery, Nottingham

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