Professor Mahon is on sabbatical leave until Michaelmas term 2026.
She is not considering MPhil or PhD students until the Academic Year 2026-27.
Biography
Alyce Mahon specialises in Modern and Contemporary Art History and Theory. She studied the History of Art & Architecture and Modern English at Trinity College Dublin, graduating with a double first and gold medal for exceptional academic achievement. Awarded both Chevening and British Academy scholarships for doctoral studies she moved to London to pursue a PhD at the Courtauld Institute of Art. She received her doctorate in 1999 and took up her position at Cambridge in 2000 when she was also elected Fellow of Trinity College Cambridge.
Research
Research and Curating:
Professor Mahon specialises on the dynamic between the body and the body politic in modern and contemporary art, photography, film and exhibition practice - from Dada, Surrealism and the Sixties counter-culture to queer-feminist art today.
Mahon has been involved in numerous international exhibitions as advisor, catalogue contributor and guest curator. She is the academic and curatorial advisor for Ithell Colquhoun: Between Worlds | Tate St Ives for Tate St Ives, Cornwall (Feb 2-May 2, 2025) and Tate Britain, London (June-October 2025), the first retrospective of this British surrealist-occultist artist and writer.
She co-curated SADE: Freedom or Evil for the Centre de Cultura Contempoània de Barcelona (May 10 to Oct 15, 2023), the first exhibition to explore the philosophy of the Marquis de Sade and his impact on modern and contemporary art, visual culture, and activism.
Mahon curated the first major retrospective of American Surrealist Dorothea Tanning for the Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid (Oct. 3, 2018-Jan. 6, 2019) that toured to Tate Modern London (Feb 28 - June 9 2019). She was also the curatorial advisor for the first retrospective exhibition of Surrealist Leonor Fini in the United States - Leonor Fini: Theatre of Desire, 1930-1990 - Museum of Sex in 2018-2019. In addition, Mahon has contributed to the accompanying catalogues for, and often acted as curatorial advisor to, major exhibitions on modern and contemporary art throughout her career, especially advancing research and the profile of women of the avant-garde. These include: Maria Martins (MASP, 2021-22), Fantastic Women: Surreal Worlds from Meret Oppenheim to Louise Bourgeois (Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt and Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, 2020), Couples Modernes 1900-1950 (Pompidou Metz, and Hayward Gallery London, 2018), Dreamers Awake (White Cube Bermondsey, London, 2017), No Place Like Home (Israel Museum, Jerusalem, 2017), Silent Partners: Artist and Mannequin from Function to Fetish (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge 2014 & Musée Bourdelle, Paris, 2015 ), The Institute of Sexology (Wellcome Collection, London, 2014), Le Surréalisme et l’objet (Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2013), Leonora Carrington (Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, 2013), Matta. Fiktionen (Bucerius Kunst Forum, Hamburg 2012), and Donna: Avanguardia femminista negli anni ’70 (Galleria nazionale d'arte moderna, Rome, 2010).
She was awarded a British Academy/ Leverhulme Senior Research Fellowship for 2017-2018, and has been a Distinguished Scholar for the Hong Kong Li Ka Shing Foundation's Scholars Exchange Programme with the University of Cambridge (2004), giving a series of academic and public lectures across China; a Research Fellow at the Columbia University Institute for Scholars, Reid Hall, Paris (2005); a Visiting Scholar at Princeton University (2006-07); and an Andrew Mellon Teaching Fellow at CRASSH, Cambridge (2009).
Publications
Monographs:
* Dorothea Tanning: A Surrealist World (forthcoming, Yale University Press, Nov. 2025). The life and art of Dorothea Tanning (1910–2012) exemplify the transnational spirit and nomadic practice of Surrealism, an achievement made all the harder because the artist was a woman. In this new book, Mahon maps Tanning's career across lived places and imagined spaces in Chicago, Arizona, Paris, and Seillans, through to her final years in New York, expertly drawing from extensive archival and curatorial research to demonstrate how Tanning’s work expanded postwar global Surrealism in offering a world of what she terms 'ecopoetic' surrealist perspectives.
* The Marquis de Sade and the Avant-Garde (Princeton University Press, 2020; reprinted in paperback in 2025). Awarded Millard Meiss Publication Award by CAA, this monograph is an exploration of Sade's 'philosophy in the bedroom' and how avant-garde artists, writers, dramatists, and filmmakers drew on it to challenge oppressive regimes and their restrictive codes and conventions of gender and sexuality. Mahon provides close analyses of early illustrated editions of Sade’s works and looks at drawings, paintings, and photographs by leading surrealists such as André Masson, Leonor Fini, and Man Ray, as well as exploring how Sade’s ideas are reflected in the fiction of Guillaume Apollinaire, Robert Desnos, and Anne Desclos, the Happenings of Jean-Jacques Lebel, the theater of Peter Brook, the cinema of Pier Paolo Pasolini, and the multimedia art of Paul Chan. She coins the term ‘the Sadean imagination’ for her analysis throughout, drawing on feminist theorists such as Simone de Beauvoir, Susan Sontag, and Angela Carter in her critical perspective.
* Surrealism and the Politics of Eros, 1938-1968 (Thames & Hudson, 2005). Translated into Spanish as Surrealismo Eros y Politica (Alianza Barcelona, 2009). A critical history drawing on extensive archival material and interviews in which Mahon documents the ground-breaking international Surrealist exhibitions held in Paris in 1938, 1947, 1959 and 1965, assessing the Surrealists' radical and erotic spatial and installation practice, and seeking to re-assert the importance of Surrealism and its global impact after World War II.
* Eroticism & Art (Oxford University Press, 2005) . Republished in paperback, as part of Oxford History of Art Series, in 2007. A comprehensive feminist study of erotic painting, sculpture, photography, performance and new media art, assessing the expression and repression of desire and transgression in western art from the Renaissance to the twenty-first century, especially at crucial political moments in modern and contemporary history.
Edited Books:
* Dorothea Tanning, Behind the Door Another Invisible Door, Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, 2018 & Tate Modern, 2019 with two essays by Mahon: "Dorothea Tanning: Behind the Door, Another Invisible Door" and "Life is Something Else: Chambre 202, Hôtel du Pavot".
Co-Authored Books:
* Alyce Mahon, with Antonio Monegal, SADE: Freedom or Evil, Barcelona: CCCB, 2023
*Alyce Mahon, with Axel Heil and Robert Fleck, Jean Jacques Lebel: Barricades, Köln: Walther König, 2014
Journal Editor
Co-Editor of the International Journal of Surrealism [IJS], Minnesota University Press
https://www.upress.umn.edu/journals/international-journal-of-surrealism/
Recent Book Chapters:
2021 “A Consciousness of Being: Burn, Baby, Burn and the Political Art of Roberto Matta”, in Radical Dreams: Surrealism, Counterculture, Resistance, Abigail Susik and Elliott H King (eds), Penn State University Press, 2021, pp. 114-125
2021 “Surrealism and Eros”, Cambridge Critical Concepts: Surrealism, ed. Natalya Lusty, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.112-128
2020 “Dorothea Tanning, from a Feminist Perspective”, Feminist Perspectives in Art Productions and Theories of Art, Xabier Arakistain and Lourdes Méndez (eds), Bilbao: Azkuna Zentroa, Bilbao (English, Spanish, Catalan editions)
Recent Catalogue Essays:
2025 “Surrealism, Sexuality and the Search for the Absolute in the Art of Ithell Colquhoun”, Ithell Colquhoun: Between Worlds, London: Tate Publications
2024 “Les Larmes d'Eros", Surréalisme, Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou
2023 “Leonor Fini e l’amicizia come stile di vita”, Leonor Fini. Fabricio Clerici, Trento e Rovereto - MART/ Museo di arte moderna e contemporanea.
2022 “Daughters of the Minotaur: Women Surrealists’ Re-Enchantment of the World”, The Milk of Dreams: 59th Venice Biennale
2022 “Alchemical Desire in Surrealism”, Surrealism & Magic, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice & Barberini Museum, Potsdam
2021 "‘The Overwhelming Abundance of Life’: Maria Martins and Global Surrealism”, Maria Martins, Museu de Arte de São Paulo.
2020 "Dorothea Tanning, Surrealism, and 'Unknown but Knowable States' of Being", Fantastic Women: Surreal Worlds from Meret Oppenheim to Louise Bourgeois, Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt & Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek
2020 "The Language of Flowers", Linderism, Kettles Yard Gallery, Cambridge
Teaching and Supervisions
At undergraduate level, Mahon teaches a Part II option titled "The Poetics & Politics of Surrealism" which addresses the long history of Surrealism (1924-69) as well as its impact on the counter-culture and its legacy in contemporary art. She convenes and contributes lectures and seminars on modern and contemporary art to core BA papers including Part I 'Paper 1: Objects' and 'Paper 2/3: The Making of Art' , and Part IIB 'The Display of Art: The Politics of Display'. She also contributes lectures to the core, team led paper 'Approaches to the History of Art'.
At graduate level, Mahon supervises students and teaches on the team-taught MPhil degree. Topics she covers include Symbolism, the livre d'artiste, Surrealist art and writing, the 'informe' in inter-war Paris, 1960s performance art and contemporary feminist art, film and photography.
Professor Mahon has supervised numerous doctoral students to completion during her 25 years at Cambridge and on various historical and thematic aspects of American, French, German, British and Czech Surrealism; inter-war art in France and American art and politics; modern and contemporary French and German photography; queer-feminist art practice from punkfeminism to Moving Image Art .
Professor Mahon welcomes enquiries from prospective PhD students interested in fields related to her specialisms in modern and contemporary art as reflected in her curatorial and publication work to date. See: Current PhD Topics in the Department | Department of History of Art
