Lucy Byford
Programme:
History of Art - MPhil/PhD/MSc by Research
Start date:
Sep-18
Mode of study:
Full time
Research title:
Seditious Strategies in Print and Performance from Simplicissimus to Berlin Dada, 1896-1920
Biography
Lucy Byford’s doctorate from the University of Edinburgh is funded by the Scottish consortium of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). Her thesis applies a Bakhtinian analysis to overlooked archival material in order to bring new aspects of Berlin Dada’s output to light, focusing on two realms of cultural production: magazines and performance.
She has previously published on the topic of epic theatre set designs by John Heartfield, and in 2022, she contributed a chapter to Imagining the Apocalyse: Art and the End Times (ed. Edwin Coomasaru and Theresa Deichert) on Johannes Baader’s 1919 intervention in the National Assembly. In 2019, Lucy conducted a research fellowship at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich supported by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). Before commencing her doctoral studies, she worked for the Commission for Looted Art in Europe, conducting provenance research on Nazi-looted art in the archives of the imperial collection in Berlin.
Lucy has taught History of Art 2 to second-year undergraduates, covering topics of visual and cultural history from 1700 to the present day, with a focus on issues of race, class and gender.
Research
Research
Research interests
- German early twentieth-century avant-garde performance and set design
- German humour magazines and avant-garde magazines from the Wilhelmine and Weimar periods
- Popular entertainment culture and satire in the early twentieth-century
Publications
‘Dada Millenarianism: Johannes Baader’s Intervention at the National Assembly in Weimar, 1919,’ Imagining the Apocalypse: Art and the End Times, eds. Edwin Coomasaru and Theresa Deichert (London: Courtauld Books Online, 2022), 179-204.
‘Beyond Asiatic Despotism: The Stagecraft of Erwin Piscator’s Adaptation of Tai Yang erwacht (1931),’ MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities: Reframing Exoticism in European Literature, vol. 14 (2019): 18-28.
Conference Papers
‘Radical Roots? Mapping carnivalesque connections between early twentieth-century Witzblätter and Berlin Dada’s Little Magazines’, Association for Art History (AAH) Conference, April 2020. For the session ‘The Visual Politics of Independent Print Media in the Twentieth Century’, convened by Victoria Bazin and Louise Siddons.
‘“Dada Vaudeville”: Reconstructing Stages and Spectatorship in Berlin Dada's Performance, 1919-1920’, November 2020. For the Dada and Surrealism Research Group, University of Edinburgh, chaired by Prof. Patricia Allmer.
‘Embodied Apocalypse: Dada Performance in Berlin’, October 2019. For the ‘Imagining the Apocalypse’ Conference, Courtauld Institute, October 2019.
‘The figure of the fool in the German avant-garde: the artist as carnival’s “accredited representative”’ for Danger! The History of Art Postgraduate Conference, University of Edinburgh, May 2019.
‘Staging the carnivalesque: a work in progress’, for the Fourth Year German Conference, University of Edinburgh, February 2018.
‘The Montage Mädels and the Production of Counter-Propaganda’ for the panel, ‘Dada Data: Contemporary art practice in the era of post-truth politics’, AAH Annual Conference, April 2018.