List of Supervisors for PhDs
If you do meet the course requirements, you are recommended to consult the list of our established University Teaching Officers (UTOs) and their research interests (see below for links to information about each of our UTOs). If one of our UTOs has relevant research interests to your own, please email them directly with a short research proposal of about 300 words, an example of your writing and a CV to determine whether they are potentially available to work with you as a supervisor before you make a formal application.
Professor Rosalind (Polly) Blakesley (Due to a change in role within the University, Professor Blakesley will be supervising only a limited number of PhD students for several years) - European, British and Russian art, 18th-early 20th century
Professor Donal Cooper - Italian late Medieval and Renaissance art
Dr Elizabeth Deans - European, British, and American architecture and material culture, 17th–18th century, especially related to architectural drawing
Professor Caroline Van Eck - European art and architecture and their theories, in particular French, the reception of Graeco-Roman art, the anthropology of art, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, and Aby Warburg
Dr Kareem Estefan - Film, video, and digital media, particularly Arab moving-image practices, documentary and Global South cinema, and activist engagements with colonialism and its legacies in contemporary art and film
Dr Peyvand Firouzeh - Art, architecture, and material cultures of the Islamic world, especially Iran, South Asia, and more broadly, the Indian Ocean world in medieval and early modern times; material cultures of Sufism, text-image relations and arts of the book, talismans, textile and architecture, cross-cultural and transcultural exchange
Professor Alyce Mahon - 20th-century art, especially Surrealism, performance and feminist art practice (Professor Mahon will not accepting PhDs until October 2026
Dr Henning von Mirbach - Painting and visual culture of early modern China (ca. 1500–1800)
Dr Xin Peng - Film history, classical Hollywood cinema, critical race and postcolonial theories, Asian American studies and transnational cinemas
Professor Frank Salmon - British and European Architecture, 17th-19th century
Dr Laura Slater - Medieval art and architecture
Professor Amy Tobin - 20th- and 21st-century art, and moving image, especially in relation to feminism, gender politics, queer and post-colonial theory (on sabbatical for the 25/26 Academic year)
Dr Matthew Walker - Intellectual engagement with architectural design and practice in seventeenth and eighteenth-century Britain.