Richard J. Williams is Professor of Contemporary Visual Cultures, based in History of Art. His teaching and research has explored many aspects of the visual culture of contemporary cities: their representation in art and film, their appropriation of old infrastructure for new purposes, and their use of museums and culture to define new roles. He has written a great deal urban ruins, modernist ruins in particular. His work has drawn on the social sciences and psychology as well as art and architectural history. He has worked closely with architects and architectural historians throughout his career. He was chair of EAHN2021 in Edinburgh, Europe’s largest gathering of architectural historians.

Richard’s books include After Modern Sculpture, a groundbreaking study of the New York art scene in the 1960s. The Anxious City (2004) explored the spectacular changes wrought on the British city from the 1980s to the early 2000s. Brazil: Modern Architectures in History (2009) followed, an account of Brazil’s use of modernist aesthetics to shape political and social agendas. Sex and Buildings (2013) explored modern architecture’s response to changing sexual mores. The Architecture of Art History (written with Mark Crinson, 2018) looks at the relationship between the disciplines of architecture and art history. Why Cities Look the Way They Do (2019) argued for a process-oriented approach to the study of cities. Richard’s intellectual biography of the architectural critic Reyner Banham, Reyner Banham Revisited, was published in 2021, along with The Culture Factory: Architecture and the Contemporary Art Museum.

Richard’s latest book The Expressway World, was published in May 2025 by Polity. It describes the often surprising ways in which cities around the world have come to terms with urban motorways, with stories from USA, the UK, Brazil, Spain and South Korea. It was reviewed by the Financial Times, the Daily Telegraph, the New Left Review and elsewhere. Supported by a Leverhulme International Research Fellowship at the University of São Paulo in 2022, British Academy/Leverhulme Senior Research Fellowship in 2024, the research for the book also produced articles for City, the London Review of Books, and other venues.

Over the years Richard’s work has been featured by BBC Radio 3, BBC Radio 4, and the BBC World Service, The New York Times, The Guardian, The Herald, Foreign Policy, the Financial Times, The Times, Times Higher Education and frequently by local media. On social media you can find him on Instagram.