Professor Amy Tobin

  • Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art [On sabbatical leave 2025/26]
  • Curator, Contemporary Programmes, Kettle’s Yard
  • Fellow of Newnham College
  • Director of Studies in History of Art at Newnham College [On sabbatical leave 2025/26]
Professor Amy Tobin

Contact

About

At Cambridge, I teach modern and contemporary art across the History of Art Tripos, and convene a module on Contemporary Art. I am the author of Women Artists Together: Art in the Age of Women’s Liberation (Yale, 2023) and the co-editor of Cecilia Vicuña, Saborami: An Expanded Facsimile Edition (Book Works, 2024) with Luke Roberts. My research has focused on histories of feminism and art, and more broadly political struggle, alternative cultures and modern and contemporary art.

I am also curator, contemporary programmes at Kettle’s Yard, where I have curated or co-curated exhibitions on Louise Bourgeois, Julie Mehretu, Ian Giles, Rose Garrard, Lubaina Himid and Magda Stawarska, Issam Kourbaj, Linder, Sutapa Biswas, Howardena Pindell, and Megan Rooney. In 2023, I co-curated the major group exhibition Making New Worlds: Li Yuan-chia & Friends with Hammad Nasar and Sarah Victoria Turner and in 2025, the group exhibition Here is a Gale Warning: Art, Crisis and Survival.

I have written on numerous artists including Helen Chadwick, Rose English, Rose Garrard, Eva Hesse, Candace Hill-Montgomery, Margaret Harrison, Kay Hunt, Alexis Hunter, Mary Kelly, Lotte Konow Lund, Suzanne Lacy, Ketty La Rocca, Linder, Rosemary Mayer, Julie Mehretu, Howardena Pindell, Cecilia Vicuña, Monica Sjöö, Jo Spence, Hannah Wilke and Li Yuan-chia, in addition to publishing articles in Feminist Review, Women: A Cultural Review, Tate Papers and Art History and contributing to exhibition catalogues including The Infinite Woman (Fondation Carmignac, 2024), The Time of Our Lives (Drawing Room, 2024), Women in Revolt: Art and Activism in Britain 1970–1990 (Tate, 2023) and Empowerment: Art and Feminisms (Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, 2022). I also write art criticism for Burlington Contemporary.

Between 2021 and 2025, I served as a co-Director of Cambridge Visual Culture (https://www.cvc.cam.ac.uk/) – which aims to connect researchers and practitioners working on the visual throughout Cambridge – and I am currently a member of the Higher Education Committee of the Association for Art History.

Research

My research has focused on histories of feminism and art, as well as the methodologies of feminist art history. I am committed to an inclusive feminism, as well as to researching adjacent political and epistemological struggles, including around gender, sexuality, race, class and their intersections. My book Women Artists Together: Art in the Age of Women’s Liberation also focused on the politics of collaboration and collectivity and the formation of alternative cultures, which is another research interest. 

I welcome applications for graduate study on feminism and art, art and political struggle in the later twentieth and twenty-first centuries, histories of women artists, trans studies and art, queer art and theory, artist publishing, alternative institutional models, artist moving image and contemporary British and American art.

I have also supervised and co-supervised graduate students in English, Gender Studies and Film and Screen Studies. 

Between 2021–2025, I was co-I on the AHRC-IRC-funded oral history project Feminist Art Making Histories and between 2019–2023, a co-organiser of the research network Groupwork: Art and Feminism with Dr Rachel Warriner and Dr Catherine Grant.