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Staff Profile

Dr Briony Carlin

Lecturer in Art History

Background

[What I do] My teaching, curating and research are guided by questioning how we come to understand something as 'art' through experience, and how and why those experiences become meaningful. These questions depend on attuning to and through many ways of knowing, including the multi-sensory and creative practice.

[Why] I want to articulate in more concrete terms the agency of ineffable, enriching encounters with art, of many shapes and sizes, whilst critiquing who or what might be excluded, compromised, othered or overlooked in these encounters. I believe this can make the enjoyment and critical potential of art more accessible to more people.

[How] I write and curate with versatile visual media that sit in the margins of 'fine art', specifically photography, photobooks and paint-by-numbers art. I often use my own experiences as a starting point for thinking about how impactful encounters with arty things are politicised, through socio-economic factors and more formalised structures such as museums. This work goes into the world in different formats, including essays, exhibitions, a podcast and most recently, my first monograph Encounters with Photobooks: How Art and Experience Matter (Leuven University Press, 2026).

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I first came to the North East in 2009, from the big skies and flat Fenland of Cambridgeshire. Since 2018, I have taught on art history, curating, museum studies and media studies programmes at Newcastle University, University of York and University of Sunderland. Before this, I worked as Assistant Curator of Photographs at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

I completed my PhD in 2022 at Newcastle University. I have a Masters degree in Art Museum and Gallery Studies and BA (Hons) in French, Spanish and Art History. I also run Binder: Art Book Club at The NewBridge Project - an informal, show-and-tell event for people with a shared interest in cool arty books, zines or other printed matter. In my freelance practice I work directly with artists, and with organisations including The Photographers' Gallery, the Royal Hibernian Academy, Fast Forward: Women in Photography, Amgueddfa Cymru (Museum Wales) and the National Gallery of Scotland.

Research

My research seeks to understand how specific encounters with art objects and other cultural products shape the meanings we come to associate with them. It questions, what are the social settings, emotional textures, rules and regulations that permeate these encounters? And, what role do art objects themselves play in structuring the places we encounter them, and inviting responses?

I have explored these questions through my doctoral work on the photobook, as an emergent, experiential, portable, performative and multiple artistic form and commodity. I completed my PhD at Newcastle University in March 2022. My thesis 'Bindings, Boundaries and Cuts: Relating Agency and Ontology in Photobook Encounters' was supervised by Professor Chris Whitehead and Dr Tina Sikka. My first monograph, Encounters with Photobooks: How Art and Experience Matter, will be published by Leuven University Press in Spring 2026.

My additional projects have considered these themes in relation to popular culture museum collections and paint-by-numbers art. I approach these interests with a more-than-human perspective to look at other agencies and affects in art encounters. In particular, I am seeking to understand how feminist new materialist ethico-onto-epistemologies create new ways of knowing with and about artworks.

My methodology combines ethnographic and auto-ethnographic techniques with interdisciplinary theory to consider what kinds of knowledges are marginalised in academic scholarship and institutions like museums and universities. Through this inquiry, I worked as Postdoctoral Research Associate on the project Inclusion and Safety in Field-Based Environmental Sciences Research, based in the School of Natural and Environmental Sciences. 

I was Co-ordinator for Ethnographies of the Ineffable, a Knowledge Exchange project with Monash University, Melbourne (2023). I worked with an interdisciplinary group of researchers including scholars of design, performance, curating and poetry to experiment with innovative, playful methodologies to approach, instrumentalise and remediate some kinds of experiences, feelings and phenomena we find hard to articulate in language.

Teaching

2023-2024

MCH8501 Museums, Galleries and Heritage in Society

MCH8502 Management Practices in Museums, Galleries and Heritage

MCH8516 Museum Gallery Heritage Practice

MCH8600 Museum Gallery Heritage Professional Practice and Research

MCH8057 Media Analysis

Dissertation supervision

Co-ordinator of MGH Futures

Placement Manager for Museum Studies, Curating Art and Global Heritage Management (Semester 2)

Publications