Professor Gail Day
- Position: Professor of Art History and Critical Theory
- Areas of expertise: Theories, methodologies and historiographies of modern and contemporary art, photography and architecture; Marxism; Critical Theory; emancipatory thought; aesthetics and politics.
- Email: G.A.Day@leeds.ac.uk
- Location: School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies, University Road
- Website: X
Profile
My book Dialectical Passions: Negation in Postwar Art Theory (Columbia University Press) was shortlisted for the Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize.
I am Professor of Art History & Critical Theory in the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds. I am Director of Research until September 2022 and then REF Unit of Assessment Lead.
I am co-founder of the centre for Critical Materialist Studies. I initiated the project Aesthetic Form and Uneven Modernities with colleagues from Universidade de Sao Paulo and Birkbeck, and I belong to Centro de estudos Desmanche e Formacao de Sistemas Simbolicos at USP (DESFORMAS). I am an active member of the research collective for the Institute of Historical Research seminar Marxism in Culture (University of London).
Responsibilities
- REF 2029 Unit of Assessment Lead
Research interests
- aesthetics and politics
- capitalism and form
- intersection of value theory, commodity, reification, social process and abstraction with cultural and aesthetic theory analysis
- critique of postwar commodity cultures
- traditions of emancipatory and dissident thought and their role in visual and material culture
- Marxism and issues arising from Western Marxism, the New Left and the new social movements
- legacies of dialectical thought
- history of theorisations of the avant-garde and neo-avant-garde, practices of negation, critical practice.
- theories, geographies and economies of social transformation and global restructuring
- the role of non-identity in subject (trans)formation
- the interface of radical philosophical aesthetics and historical paradigms.
Primary investigator (PI)
Qualifications
- BA (Hons) Fine Art
- MA Social History of Art
- PhD
Professional memberships
- Fellow of Higher Education Academy
Student education
- critical and theoretical debates in modern and recent art
- contemporary critique of capitalism in art, photography and video
- transformations from high modernist to post-conceptual problematics
- social methodologies of art historiography and philosophical aesthetics
- intersections of Marxism and Critical Theory with aesthetic questions.