Dr Alastair Wright
Dr Alastair Wright
Tutorial Fellow in History of Art
Email: Dr Alastair Wright
Teaching Interests
I give lectures, classes and tutorials in 19th and 20th century art and visual culture for both the first year course (Prelims) and papers taken in subsequent years. For Prelims I also offer lectures on art historical theories and methods. For Finals I offer further lectures on art historical method and on art in colonial contexts. At graduate level, I teach a course on the interaction between modernism and mass culture from the later 19th century to the present. In all my teaching I encourage students to engage as closely as possible with actual works of art, regularly leading visits to collections in Oxford and beyond. I welcome student interest in a wide range of media, from painting and sculpture to film, video, and sound art.
Research Interests
My research focuses primarily on European modernism and the complicated ways in which modern works of art reflect their historical context. My first book, Matisse and the Subject of Modernism (Princeton University Press, 2004), asked how it was that the artist’s contemporaries became convinced that his painting posed a threat to traditional concepts of the self, the nation, even the West. My current research revolves around similar questions. In one project I am exploring representations of death and belatedness in French art of the late 19th and early 20th centuries; in another I am examining how Paul Gauguin’s prints translated French visions of Tahiti into visual form. In addition to my interest in French art, I also work on British (I am currently finishing up a book on Ford Madox Brown) and on non-European modernisms.
Publications
My recent publications include: ‘Painting, Mourning, and the Commune: Maximilien Luce’s A Paris Street in 1871,’ Oxford Art Journal 32, no. 2 (2009); ‘Thoughts on Difference in India and Elsewhere,’ Art Bulletin 110, no. 4 (Dec. 2008): 548-54; ‘Du fauvisme à l’orientalisme: Correspondance avec Matisse,” in Van Dongen, exh. cat. (Monaco: Musée Nouveau d’Art Moderne, 2008), 165-68; ‘Ford Madox Brown’s The Body of Harold: Representing England at Mid-Century,’ Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide (autumn 2007); and ‘The Work of Imitation: Turkish Modernism and the Generation of 1914,’ in Edges of Empire: Orientalism and Visual Culture (London: Blackwells, 2005).
