Tamara Trodd profile photo

Job title:

Senior Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Art

Role:

Head of Subject Area - History of Art

Office:

Room 0.62, Higgitt Gallery, Hunter Building

Biography

I am currently completing a book, Counter Realism: Art and Subjectivity in Contemporary Capitalism (Manchester University Press, forthcoming), focusing on examples of artists’ film and video work (including William Kentridge, Amalia Ulman, Melanie Gilligan, Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch, and Elizabeth Price) in relation to examples of 'realist' art and writing from the 1930s and 1940s (including Henry Moore, Simone Weil, Bertolt Brecht and Alain Resnais). Research for this book was supported by the award of a Leverhulme Research Fellowship in 2022-2023.

My early-career research focused on the theme of technology in modern and contemporary art, looking in particular at the impact of photography and film as technologies of mechanical reproduction. My book, The Art of Mechanical Reproduction: Technology and Aesthetics from Duchamp to the Digital (University of Chicago Press, 2015) examines the impact of the idea of ‘mechanical reproduction’ as it was received into art practices, including painting, sculpture and drawing, from the 1920s to the present day.

I have an ongoing research interest in artists' film and art on film. My edited book, Screen/Space: The Projected Image in Contemporary Art (University of Manchester Press, 2011), studies the projected image as a distinctive form in art since the 1960s, distinguishing it from experimental film or video. My forthcoming essay, ‘“The solid reality of a piece of ore”: Alain Resnais’s and Robert Hessens’s Guernica (1950) in relation to André Bazin’s theory of cinematic realism’, examines the political and affective significance of this important but little-studied film in relation to the mid-century genre of the documentary film about art.

Articles I have published in journals including October Art History, the Oxford Art Journal and Woman's Art Journal as well as catalogue essays and artist interviews for exhibitions at the Whitechapel Gallery, London and Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh, pursue the themes of media, technology, gender and subjectivity in relation to artists including Helen Chadwick, Tacita Dean, Jane and Louise Wilson, Roman Signer and Thomas Demand. 

Teaching

In 2025-26 I will teach the following special option courses:

  • Contemporary Artists' Film and Video (PGT)
  • Documentary Film, c.1920 to the present day (UG)

In addition I contribute to the following team-taught courses:

  • Research Theories and Methods (PGT)
  • The Cultures and Politics of Display (PGT)
  • History of Art 2B: From Modernism and the Avant-Gardes to Postmodernism and the Culture Industry (UG)

Research

Recent and upcoming publications, grants and talks include:

PUBLICATIONS:

'Helen Chadwick's Of Mutability (1984-86) in relation to British and American feminist art and theory of the 1970s and 1980s', Woman's Art Journal, vol. 45, no. 2, Fall/Winter, 2024, pp. 25-36.

‘Creation and Decreation in Tacita Dean’s Antigone’, October, vol. 190, Fall/Winter, 2024, pp. 62-82.

'Tacita Dean: World-Making', forthcoming in George Baker and Annie Rana eds, Tacita Dean, OCTOBER Files (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2025).

‘The solid reality of a piece of ore’: Alain Resnais’s and Robert Hessens’s Guernica (1950) in relation to André Bazin’s theory of cinematic realism’, forthcoming in French Screen Studies, 2025.

GRANTS:

September, 2022 – December, 2023 Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship, ‘Figuring the Flesh in Contemporary Film and Video Art’.

2013-17 Philip Leverhulme Prize, awarded to early career researchers for outstanding international research.

TALKS:

'"The solid reality of a piece of ore": Alain Resnais and Robert Hessens' Guernica (1950)', University of Edinburgh Film Studies, 27 February, 2024.

'William Kentridge, Henry Moore and the Subject of Mining', Moore and Mining Research Symposium, St Albans Museum, 28 March, 2023.

'"A world blown from the bubble chamber of a photocopier": Helen Chadwick's The Oval Court (1986)', Xerography: Women Artists, 1965-1990, Institute national d'histoire de l'art, Paris, 18-19 November, 2021.

Current PhD students

Madelyne Evans

Decreating the self as feminist creative act: Mysticism, Simone Weil and the work of Gwen John

PhD Supervision Topics

  • Twentieth century and contemporary art
  • Artists' film and video
  • Critical and aesthetic theory

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