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Staff Profile

Dr Olga Smith

NUAcT Fellow - Culture and Creative Arts

  • Address: Fine Art
    Newcastle University
    Armstrong Building
    Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 7RU
Background

I am an art historian specializing in contemporary art, and specifically photography and new media. My research interests evolved over time to include interchanges between art and intellectual ideas, trans-national identity, cultural memory and, most recently, ecology. My current research is broadly concerned with the role of visual culture in shaping a cultural response to current environmental crises, and is specifically directed at analysing the representations of landscapes through an ecocritical framework.

 

A graduate of the University of Cambridge (BA, MPhil, PhD), I have an interdisciplinary training in art history, philosophy and literature. Prior to coming to Newcastle University in 2023 I have been a recipient of a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Research Fellowship at the University of Vienna, and postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Warwick and Humboldt University of Berlin. Previously, I have held a teaching fellowship at the University of St Andrews and a curatorial post at Tate Britain and Tate Modern. My research has been supported by EU’s Horizon 2020 and the AHRC in the UK, and I have been a visiting researcher at the The National Institute for Art History (INHA) in Paris and Ca’ Foscari University in Venice.

 

I am affiliated with New International Center for the Humanities and Social Change at Ca' Foscari University, Venice, and Environmental Humanities Network at the University of Warwick, which I helped to establish. I am the co-founder of Ph, an AHRC-funded network of scholars and artists working with photography, which collaborated on projects such as Either/And. This has been one of the projects that I developed with an aim of engaging wider audiences, alongside curatorial and public programme events developed in partnership with museums, galleries and arts organisations including the Photographers’ Gallery, National Media Museum, and Paris Photo. I am on the editorial board of Focales journal (France) and write for art press.

Research

The main thread connecting different topics in my research is a search for narratives of identity and belonging that are attuned to the realities of the globally connected world we inhabit today. This agenda has been undoubtedly shaped by my experiences as a former stateless person and an immigrant.


My first book, Contemporary Photography in France: Between Theory and Practice, is the first English-language history of contemporary photography in France (Leuven University Press, 2022). It contributes to the ongoing endeavors to further expand global histories of photography by positioning photographic practices within historical, cultural and above all intellectual events that defined French national experience in the contemporary period. The book received praise as 'open new perspectives in global media historiographies' and has been awarded publication grants from the Österreichische Forschungsgemeinschaft and Association for Art History.


Currently I am at work on two major projects. Landscape is the focus of my first project, directed at analysing the representations of landscapes in contemporary art, with a particular emphasis on new media, using ecocritical analysis as method. The distinctive feature of this project is to consider new imaging technologies as not just material supports of landscape pictures, but as active participants in the evolution of the genre. The wider aim of this interdisciplinary project is to establish a theoretical and aesthetic meeting point for art historical study and the burgeoning concentration of research in environmental humanities.


Alongside this, I am collaborating with Andrew Patrizio (University of Edinburgh) on an edited volume 'Towards Ecocritical Art History: Methods and Practices.' This emerged from series of workshops held in 2021-2022 with an aim of identifying methodological tools that will facilitate the work of art historians engaged with the issues of environmental interrelations.




Publications