Professor Gail Day
- Position: Professor of Art History & 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
- Phone: +44(0)113 343 5263
- Location: School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies, University Road
- Website: Twitter | ORCID
Profile
Gail Day's Dialectical Passions: Negation in Postwar Art Theory (Columbia University Press) was shortlisted for the Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize.
She is Senior Lecturer and Director of Research in History of Art in the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds, where she is co-founder of the centre for Critical Materialist Studies (https://www.fine-art.leeds.ac.uk/research/research-centres-and-groups/centre-for-critical-materialist-studies/).
Gail initiated the project Aesthetic Form & Uneven Modernities with colleagues from Universidade de Sao Paulo and Birkbeck, and belongs to Centro de estudos Desmanche e Formacao de Sistemas Simbolicos at USP (DESFORMAS; https://desformas.org). She is an active member of the research collective for the Institute of Historical Research seminar Marxism in Culture (Institute of Historical Research, School of Advanced Study, University of London.
Responsibilities
- Director of Research & Innovation
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.
<h4>Research projects</h4> <p>Any research projects I'm currently working on will be listed below. Our list of all <a href="https://ahc.leeds.ac.uk/dir/research-projects">research projects</a> allows you to view and search the full list of projects in the faculty.</p>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; the contemporary critique of capitalism in art, photography and video; the transformations from high modernist to post-conceptual problematics; the social methodologies of art historiography and philosophical aesthetics; and the intersections of Marxism and Critical Theory with aesthetic questions.