Dr Fiona Anderson

Senior Lecturer in Art History

Background

I am Senior Lecturer in Art History in the Fine Art department at Newcastle. Before coming to Newcastle, I held teaching appointments at the University of York and the University of Edinburgh. I was awarded a PhD from King’s College London (KCL) in 2011 and studied for a BA and MA at the Courtauld Institute of Art. My research and teaching explores LGBTQ social and sexual cultures and art from the 1970s to the present with a particular interest in queer community building practices and the politics of urban space, mostly in the USA, and the HIV and AIDS crisis in Britain. I am interested in practices of gentrification and preservation, civic and municipal politics, and the arts, and queer approaches to challenging hegemonic histories. I am the author of the book Cruising the Dead River: David Wojnarowicz and New York's Ruined Waterfront (University of Chicago Press, 2019). My writing has also been published in journals such as Performance Research and The Journal of American Studies, and Oxford Art Journal. 

Research

My work explores LGBTQ social and sexual cultures and art from the 1970s to the present, and the relationship between sexuality, site, and art making in the USA and Europe. I am particularly interested in where, why, and how queer sexual cultures and city spaces intersect, and in the activist imperatives behind LGBTQ art making in the context of the ongoing HIV/AIDS crisis. I maintain a strong interest in experimental queer methodological approaches to challenging hegemonic historical narratives and questions of how ephemeral queer cultures might be preserved through art and writing.

I am the author of the book Cruising the Dead River: David Wojnarowicz and New York's Ruined Waterfront (University of Chicago Press, 2019), which examines the erotic and political roles that New York's post-industrial landscape played for various queer communities in the city. Telling the story of the piers as gentrification swept New York and before the AIDS crisis, Cruising the Dead River unearths buried histories of violence, regeneration, and LGBTQ activism that developed in and around this cruising scene. My writing has also been published in journals such as Performance Research, The Journal of American Studies, and Oxford Art Journal.

My next book project investigates queer kinship and marginalisation in New York City in the context of urban renewal and the AIDS crisis, with a particular focus on solidarity with animals. I am working on another long-term project examining art and the HIV/AIDS crisis in Britain. At the moment, this work is focused on the visual culture of the drug AZT and the controversy which accompanied its appearance in the late 1980s. 

I was the UK Principal Investigator for Cruising the Seventies: Unearthing Pre-HIV/AIDS Queer Sexual Cultures (CRUSEV) (2016 - 2019), a collaborative research project with academic and artist partners in Poland, Spain, and Germany, financed by the European funding agency HERA. CRUSEV explored LGBTQ social and sexual cultures of the 1970s and their significance for LGBTQ people now and in the future, and for contemporary public discourse and queer politics and identity across Europe. Details of past events and forthcoming publications can be found on our project website. 


recent invited talks

‘Cruising as Theory and Practice: Preserving New York’s Ruined Waterfront’, Queer@King’s seminar series (March 2019)

‘Cruising as Theory and Practice: Preserving New York’s Ruined Waterfront’, Northumbria University Visual and Material Culture seminar series (February 2019)

‘Ruins and the queer politics of preservation’, Queer Waste symposium, University of Cambridge (February 2019)

‘Cruising as theory and practice’ and ‘My encounters with men in and as archives’, Archives and American Art symposium, Courtauld Institute of Art, London (November 2018)

‘The Whole World and the Cemetery: Peter Hujar’s Queer Landscapes’, Nottingham Institute for Research in Visual Culture (NIRVC) (March 2017)

‘The Queer Matter of Ruins’, LGBT/Queer Visibility Matters, Keele University (June 2016)

‘We Were (Not) Here: The Queer Temporality of Contemporary AIDS Activist Art’, University of Essex, Art History Research Seminar Series (January 2016)         

‘We Were (Not) Here: The Queer Temporality of Contemporary AIDS Activist Art’, University of St Andrews, History of Art Research Seminar Series (September 2015)

 

recent conference participation & symposia

‘Queer Contagion: Keith Haring and New York’s canine imaginary’, Keith Haring: Art and Activism in 1980s New York, Tate Liverpool (November 2019)

BxNU (BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art and Northumbria University) symposium on fine art pedagogy (November 2018)

‘AIDS in the Archive: The Politics of HIV/AIDS in the Age of the Medical Humanities’, public workshops at LUX Moving Image, London (May 2018)

‘Incurably curious: Wellcome and the visual culture of the AIDS industrial complex’, HIV in Visual Culture panel, Association for Art History Annual Conference (April 2018)

‘Cruising the Past’, a public workshop at LUX Moving Image, London, with Dr Laura Guy (August 2017)

‘Between Coldstream and Clause 28: critical pedagogy and queer experience in the British art school’, Cruising the 1970s: Unearthing and archiving pre-AIDS sexual cultures in Europe in the visual arts panel (also panel convenor), Association for Art History Annual Conference (April 2017)

‘Mighty Real: Art, AIDS and Retroviral Memory in the work of Robert Blanchon’, Facing America: viewing the face in American art and visual culture, a SAVAnT (Scholars of American Visual Art and Text) symposium (July 2015)

Teaching

I have extensive teaching experience at undergraduate and graduate level. I have convened and designed undergraduate and graduate courses with an emphasis on gender and LGBTQ histories. At Newcastle, I teach Art History modules on gender and contemporary art, art writing, and art and protest. In 2018, I was shortlisted for a Newcastle University Teaching Excellence Award for 'Outstanding Contribution to Equality and Diversity in Teaching.'

Undergraduate teaching 2019/20

Stage 1

  • Art Histories I and Art Histories II

Stage 2

  • Gender and Contemporary Art

Stage 3

  • Dissertation supervisor

Stage 4

  • Art Writing

 

PhD supervision

I have experience supervising Art History and Fine Art practice-based PhD students. I welcome enquiries from potential PhD students working on topics relating to modern and contemporary art and queer history, HIV/AIDS, gentrification and art in the urban context, queer activism, and performance.

Publications