Staff Profiles

I am Senior Lecturer in Art History in the Fine Art department at Newcastle. My work explores LGBTQ social and sexual cultures and art from the 1970s to the present with a particular interest in queer world making 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. I teach modules on gender and contemporary art, art writing, and art and protest. I am Research Lead for Fine Art.

I am  the UK Principal Investigator for ​Cruising the Seventies: Unearthing Pre-HIV/AIDS Queer Sexual Cultures (CRUSEV), a three-year collaborative research project (2016-2019) which explores LGBTQ social and sexual cultures of the 1970s and their significance for LGBTQ people across Europe now and in the future. CRUSEV reconstructs aspects of LGBTQ cultures and interactions from the 1970s to consider what this knowledge can contribute to queer politics and identity in Europe’s present and future. CRUSEV is financed by the European funding agency HERA, under HERA’s ‘Uses of the Past’ theme.

My work explores LGBTQ social and sexual cultures and art from the 1970s to the present with a particular interest in queer world making 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. 

I am the UK Principal Investigator for Cruising the Seventies: Unearthing Pre-HIV/AIDS Queer Sexual Cultures (CRUSEV), a three-year collaborative research project (2016-2019) which explores LGBTQ social and sexual cultures of the 1970s and their significance for LGBTQ people across Europe now and in the future. CRUSEV reconstructs aspects of LGBTQ cultures and interactions from the 1970s to consider what this knowledge can contribute to queer politics and identity in Europe’s present and future. CRUSEV is financed by the European funding agency HERA, under HERA’s ‘Uses of the Past’ theme.As part of the CRUSEV project, I am researching the value of thinking about cruising as a queer historical methodology for queer studies in contemporary Europe. I am currently working on two new projects: one about the photographer Peter Hujar and another about the visual cultures and funding politics of the AIDS crisis in Britain (particularly the crisis around the drug AZT) and the turn towards the medical humanities in the contemporary neoliberal academic and artistic landscape.

Undergraduate teaching

Stage 1

• Art Histories I and Art Histories II

Stage 2

• Gender and Contemporary Art
• Art and Protest

Stage 3

• Dissertation supervisor

Stage 4

• Art Writing

PhD supervision

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

• Anderson F. Cruising the Dead River: David Wojnarowicz and New York's Ruined Waterfront. University of Chicago Press, 2019. In Press.
• Anderson F, Tobin A. Collaboration is Not An Alternative: Artists Working Together in London and New York, 1974–1981. In: Meredith A. Brown, Michelle Millar Fisher, ed. Collaboration and Its (Dis)contents: Art, Architecture, and Photography Since 1950. London: Courtauld Books Online, 2017, pp.158-178.
• Anderson F. ‘‘A trail of drift and debris’: Traces of Whitman in the correspondence art of Ray Johnson'. Journal of American Studies 2015, 49(1), 55-75.
• Anderson F. An Unhemmed Dress: Popular Preservation and Civic Disobedience on the Manhattan Waterfront. Shima: The International Journal of Research Into Island Cultures 2015, 9(1), 18.
• Anderson F. Cruising the Queer Ruins of New York’s Abandoned Waterfront. Performance Research 2015, 20(3), 135-144.
• Anderson F. Preserving and politicising the alternative space. Oxford Art Journal 2015, 38(3), 448-451.
• Anderson F. Notions of the Collaborative in the Work of David Wojnarowicz. Papers of Surrealism 2010, (8).