Visiting Professors

Lennard J Davis is Professor in the Department of English, Department of Disability and Human Development, and Department of Medical Education at University of Illinois at Chicago. He writes prolifically, lectures internationally, and broadcasts on literature, disability, the medical humanities, and science within the context of the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Professor Davis’s 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), Obsession (2008), and Go Tell Your Father (2009). He has been honoured regularly by the likes of the Guggenheim, and has extensive senior management experience as Head of School, as the Director of the international project Biocultures, and as a member of the Executive Committee on Stem-Cell Research at Illinois.

External Website: http://www.lennarddavis.com/

Visiting Research Fellows

Ferran Barenblit is Director of Spain’s recently opened art centre Centro Dos de Mayo, Móstoles in Madrid, and has introduced innovative curatorial, educational, and publishing initiatives in Europe and the USA. Before arriving in Madrid, he was Director of the Centre d'Art Santa Mònica (CASM) in Barcelona. At CASM, an art centre that worked with artists, writers, critics, and curators to think about art and its place in contemporary culture and society, Ferran was responsible for introducing innovative curatorial, education, and publishing initiatives. Prior to his time at CASM, he was a free-lance curator (1996-2002) and Assistant Curator, The New Museum, New York (1994-1996).

Rachel Lichtenstein is author of Rodinsky's Room (With Iain Sinclair), Rodinsky's Whitechapel, On Brick Lane, has books forthcoming on Hatton Garden and Portobello Road, and is intrigued by how as writers we mobilize their research practices to animate archives.

External Website: http://zenoagency.com/clients-list/l/lichtenstein-rachel/

Sina Najafi is a Founder and the editor-in-chief of the New York-based Cabinet Magazine, a quarterly nonprofit publication. Fascinated by curiosity itself, Sina is responsible for driving a huge range of cultural activities including the organization of exhibitions and conferences and non-traditional publications. He is Director of the New York-based nonprofit arts organization Immaterial Incorporated, which also publishes Cabinet and serves as an umbrella for a broad range of cultural activities, including the organization of exhibitions and conferences and nontraditional publications. Participants include artists, architects, anthropologists, historians, poets and philosophers, among others. He has taught at Rhode Island School of Design, NYU, Princeton University, Columbia University, Cooper Union, and Stockholm University, and is formerly co-editor-in-chief of Merge magazine, published in Stockholm and New York, and Index magazine, published in Stockholm.

External Website: http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/index.php

Dominic Willsdon is the Leanne and George Roberts Curator of Education and Public Programs at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.  He teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, and the San Francisco Art Institute.  He’s taught on the graduate programs in curating and exhibition studies at the Royal College of Art, London, and California College of the Arts.  From 2000 to 2005, Dominic was Curator of Public Events at Tate Modern.  He has published articles on aesthetics, politics and education, and is co-editor (with Diarmuid Costello) of The Life and Death of Images: Ethics and Aesthetics (Tate & Cornell UP, 2008).  Dominic oversees education, interpretation and public programs at SFMOMA, an area that currently includes new initiatives in performance/live art, educational media and the Bay Area blog Open Space.  He is currently researching the history of experimental education for artists.

Links:

http://blog.sfmoma.org/

http://www.sfmoma.org/pages/explore

http://pickpocketalmanack.org/

Peter Cornwell is director of the media research company BLIP, working on new display technologies and cultural impact of the intersection of displays and architecture. A former director of the Institute for Visual Media at ZKM, Germany and Professor at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, he was also director of the Visual Theory Group in the Department of Computing at Imperial College, London and manager of European research and development for Texas Instruments. Earlier he formed Division, Inc. in California, which became a publicly held virtual reality (VR) company working with NASA and Silicon Graphics Inc., developing commercial 3D visualisation products for aerospace, architecture and pharmaceutical companies. In 1995 he developed commercial displays for The Coca-Cola Company and has subsequently built largescale LED installations in several countries for companies such as Samsung and Landrover. His dynamically computed, 3D creative-driven approach to these installations has become the benchmark for spectacular displays in public spaces. He is currently professor of public art at Central Saint Martins, London and a member of artist group Flunk.

Alan Morrison is staff at Johns Hopkins University in the US, after teaching at University of Westminster for over twenty years. He has been the organiser of both the Westminster/Smithsonian colloquium and Westminster's London Studies programme, which have generated a number of high profile events under his stewardship. Major events which Alan has organised include the Nobel Conversations series at Westminster, the American Sublime and Deconstructing Bohemia conferences at Tate Britain, Square Politics at London's National Gallery, and the Senses of the City series at the National Portrait Gallery. He was also curator of the exhibition Father of Flight, celebrating the work of Sir George Cayley, first Chairman of the Polytechnic and aviation pioneer. Alan has a particular research interest in the work of William Hogarth and in the history of the Royal Polytechnic Institution, and has delivered papers at Tate Britain, the University of Brest, Ruskin College, Oxford, and both the Smithsonian Institution and the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. He has also published in journals such as History Today, and was co-editor of a recent special issue of the journal Literary London on Hogarth’s work.