Richard J. Williams is Professor of Contemporary Visual Cultures. His teaching and research explores the visualisation of the city, through case studies chiefly in the USA, Brazil and the UK. Key questions for Richard are: why do cities look the way they do? How have artists and film-makers, as well as professional urbanists envisioned the city? And how have real and imagined cities conditioned each other? Answering these questions, 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.

Since 2021 Richard has worked increasingly on the infrastructure of automobility. His new book on the subject, The Expressway World, will be published in May 2025 by Polity. A related article appeared in the journal City in 2024. Richard was a Leverhulme International Research Fellow at the University of São Paulo in 2022, and in 2024 he was a British Academy/Leverhulme Senior Research Fellow.

Richard’s work has been covered 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 and Substack.