Directors

Dr Marquard Smith (Director)
Dr David Cunningham (Deputy Director)

Permanent Staff

Professor John Beck
Dr Lucy Bond
Dr Matthew Charles
Dr Georgina Colby
Alison Craighead
Professor Harriet Evans
Dr Monica Germana
Dr Jon Goodbun
Dr Nigel Mapp
Dr Sas Mays
Dr Michael Nath
Peter Ride
Dr Stefan Szczelkun
Dr Alexandra Warwick
Professor Martin Willis
Dr Leigh Wilson
Dr Anne Witchard
Dr Alexa Wright

Visiting Professors and Research Fellows in Residence

Professor Peter Cornwell studied electronics and computing science in London after fine art in the Netherlands, and then joined Texas Instruments, working on the first microprocessors and becoming head of European research for TI’s Industrial Systems Division. He founded the Visual Theory Group at Imperial College, London, and later became head of the Institute of Visual Media, at ZKM, Karlsruhe. Since 1998 he has run London media research company BLIP, which undertakes commercial and cultural public display installations, and operates an international display infrastructure in which Westminster collaborates with Princeton University. He has exhibited media art in Austria, Finland, Germany, Japan, and U.S., and organised the 2007 Media Architecture conference.

Rachel Lichtenstein is a writer, artist and archivist. In 1999 she wrote Rodinsky’s Room with Iain Sinclair, and since then she has published Rodinsky’s Whitechapel (1999) and On Brick Lane (2007). This last will be joined by two other books, Hatton Garden and Portobello Road, to form a trilogy on London street markets. In 2003, she became the British Library’s first Pearson Creative Research Fellow, producing a work entitled Add. 17469: A Little Dust Whispered – both as an installation within the Library, and a subsequent book. She joined Westminster as a Visiting Research Fellow in Creative Writing in 2009, and is intrigued by how as writers we mobilize our research practices to animate archives.

Professor Allan Stoekl is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Pennsylvania State University. His many publications include the books Politics, Writing, Mutilation: The Cases of Bataille, Blanchot, Roussel, Leiris and Ponge (University of Minnesota Press, 1985); Agonies of the Intellectual: Commitment, Subjectivity, and the Performative in the Twentieth-Century French Tradition (University of Nebraska Press, 1992); and Bataille’s Peak: Energy, Religion, and Postsustainability (University of Minnesota Press, 2007). He was editor of a seminal special issue of Yale French Studies, ‘On Bataille’ (1990), and also translated Paul Fournel’s Need for the Bike (2003). All is Visiting Professor in residence at the IMCC during the academic year 2012-13.

Non-Resident Visiting Research Fellows

Ferran Barenblit is Director of Spain’s Centro Dos de Mayo, Móstolesart centre in Madrid. Before arriving in Madrid, he was Director of the Centre d’Art Santa Mònica (CASM) in Barcelona, and Assistant Curator, The New Museum, New York (1994-1996).

Sina Najafi is a Founder and the editor-in-chief of the New York-based Cabinet Magazine, and Director of the New York-based nonprofit arts organization Immaterial Incorporated. He has taught at Rhode Island School of Design, NYU, Princeton University, Columbia University, Cooper Union, and Stockholm University.

Dominic Willsdon is the Leanne and George Roberts Curator of Education and Public Programs at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He writes on contemporary art, aesthetics, and education, and is co-editor of The Life and Death of Images: Ethics and Aesthetics: Exchanges on Art and Culture (Tate, 2008)

Former Fellows and Visiting Members

Joe Banks, a.k.a. Disinformation, was a AHRC Research Fellow in the Creative and Performing Arts based at the IMCC from 2010-12. His major project, Rorschach Audio, studied ambiguities of acoustic perception, with particular emphasis on relationships between artistic and perceptual creativity and illusions of sound.

Professor Lennard J Davis is Professor in the Department of English at University of Illinois at Chicago. His books include Factual Fictions (1983), Resisting Novels (1987), Enforcing Normalcy (1995), The Disability Studies Reader (1997), My Sense of Silence (2000), Bending over Backwards (2002), and Obsession (2008). He was a Visiting Professor in the IMCC from 2008-11.

Professor Stephen Melville is Emeritus Professor in the History of Art department at Ohio State University. His publications include the books Philosophy Beside Itself: On Deconstruction and Modernism (Minnesota 1986) and Writing Art History, with Margaret Iverson (Chicago 2010).

Dr Young-Paik Chun is Reader in the Department of Art History and Theory at Hongik University, Seoul, Korea, and was Visiting Research Fellow in 2010-11, sponsored by the National Research Foundation of Korea. She is author of Cezanne’s Apples (2008) and editor of Twenty-Two Artists Talk through Generations (2010).

Dr Jarkko Toikkanen holds a PhD from University of Tampere, Finland and was a Visiting Research Fellow in 2011 supported by a full-year stipend from the Alfred Kordelin Foundation. During this time Jarkko worked on a monograph titled Suspended Failures: The Intermedial Experience of Horror. He is also co-editor of the collection The Grotesque and the Unnatural (2012).

Dr Victoria Walsh was previously Head of Adult Programmes at Tate Britain (2005-11) and was project manager for the competition to select an architect for Tate Modern and the re-launch of the Fourth Plinth Project in Trafalgar Square for the Mayor’s Cultural Office. Victoria was a Visiting Research Fellow in the IMCC from 2011-12.

Junior Visiting Research Fellows

Yuthika Sharma, Art History and Archaeology, Columbia University, New York, USA (2012)
Vanesa Rodriguez Galindo, History of Art, UNED, Madrid, Spain (2012)
Lise Mortensen, Institute of Language, Literature, and Culture, Aarhus University, Denmark (2011)
Courtney Hopf, English Literature, University of California, Davis, USA (2010-2011)
Andrea Diaz, Art History, University of Barcelona, Spain (2009)