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Will Atkin
Teaching Associate in History of Art, Faculty of Arts
Contact
Biography
BA - Courtauld Institute of Art
MA - Courtauld Institute of Art
PhD - Courtauld Institute of Art
Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship (2020-2023)
Teaching Summary
I teach a range of topics that span the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Key subjects and themes of my teaching include: Romantic art and literature, early photography in Britain, France and America, artistic and literary figurations of science and industry in the nineteenth century, Symbolist art and poetry, and the long history of twentieth-century avant-gardism, with particular interests in Cubism and Surrealism.
Some of the modules I have previously taught are listed below:
- Modernity, Misery, Mystery: Art in France, 1846-1906
- Surrealism and its Sources
- Modernisms, 1850-1950
- Photography in the Nineteenth Century
Research Summary
My research is focused on themes of historical reclamation, citation and legacy in nineteenth- and twentieth-century art history. Where this period has often conventionally been codified in terms of… read more
Current Research
My research is focused on themes of historical reclamation, citation and legacy in nineteenth- and twentieth-century art history. Where this period has often conventionally been codified in terms of innovation, invention and rupture - ideas associated with the avant-garde - my doctoral and post-doctoral research has considered converse trends of revival and historical self-definition in artistic movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These issues of latency and resurgence sit at the heart of my book, Surrealist Sorcery: Objects, Theories and Practices of Magic in the Surrealist Movement (2023), which documents the role of magical ritual and practice, observed predominantly from medieval, renaissance and nineteenth-century sources, in the Surrealist Movement between the 1920s and the 1970s. These same issues also sit closely behind the formulation of my Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship project (2020-2023), Surrealism, Romanticism, Resistance: Surrealist Art and Writing in France During the Occupation and its Aftermath, 1940-49 (working manuscript title), which examines the contested legacy of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Romantic art and literature in the ideologically fraught context of the Second World War and its aftermath. In theoretical terms, these projects seek to address the dynamics of such transhistorical conversations and appropriations as a fundamental feature of cultural discourse.
Past Research
Recently published books:
- Surrealist Sorcery: Objects, Theories, and Practices of Magic in the Surrealist Movement (Bloomsbury, 2023).
- Historical Dictionary of Surrealism (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021).
Recently published book chapters:
- 'Endless Metamorphosis: Surrealism and Alchemy', Surrealism and Magic: Enchanted Modernity (Prestel, 2022). Catalogue for the exhibition Surrealism and Magic: Enchanted Modernity at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, and Museum Barberini, Potsdam, 2022.
Recently published articles:
- 'Demonic Surrealism in Bucharest: Black Magic, Gothicism and Nihilism in Gherasim Luca's The Passive Vampire (1941-1945), Dada/Surrealism vol. 24 (April 2023).
- 'Oceanic Metamorphoses: Easter Island, Paul Gauguin and "Magic Art" through the Eyes of the Surrealists', Journal of Postcolonial Writing vol.54 no.5 (February 2019).
- 'Supernatural Beings, Shamans and Dream-places: Jules Monnerot and the Native American Touchstones of Surrealism's Mythological Realignment, 1939-1945', The Space Between: Literature and Culture, 1914-45 vol.14 (December 2018).