Staff Profile

I am a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow (2021-2024) in the Fine Art Department, working on a multi-form, creative-critical project about skateboarding as a queer cultural practice.

My background is in poetry, with a PhD on late modernist lyric that began life as a critical PhD but necessitated a more flexible structure as I began exploring the thesis in practical terms (it was the first creative-critical English PhD to be awarded at York). Poetry continues to underpin much of my research, and a desire to inhabit thinking at the level of form.

I am working on a creative non-fiction project that offers a reparative reading of the visual culture of skateboarding as a richly ambivalent and repressed site of homosocial intimacy and queer expression. I posit skateboarding as an acutely self-reflexive, modernist cultural practice, centred on the documentation and mediation by its practitioners of the articulation of (often) male-identified bodies through urban space.

Art History Dissertation (Stage 3)

Art Writing (Stage 4)

• Buchan-Watts S. On Boyment: An Introduction. In: Palace Product Descriptions: The Selected Archive. London: Phaidon Press, 2022.
• Buchan-Watts Sam. Path Through Wood. London: Prototype, 2021.
• Buchan-Watts S, Rees T. 'Dichten = Condensare'. In: Renewal. London: Kelder Projects, 2021, pp.16.
• Buchan-Watts S, Singer L, ed. Try To Be Better: A Creative-Critical Engagement with W. S. Graham. London: Prototype, 2019.
• Buchan-Watts Sam. ‘Nostalgia of a form: W. S. Graham’s Self-Conscious Ballads’ in Chicago Review 62:01/02, 2019. Chicago Review 2019, 62:01/02/03.
• Buchan-Watts Sam. Faber New Poets 15: Sam Buchan-Watts. London, UK: Faber & Faber, 2016.