Dr Fiona Anderson

Senior Lecturer in Art History

Background

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 on 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 funding for 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, among others. 

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. 

Research
My research explores LGBTQ social and sexual cultures and art from the 1970s to the present with a particular focus on cruising cultures, the HIV and AIDS crisis, queer world making practices, and the politics of urban space, mostly in the USA. I am interested in practices of gentrification and preservation, civic and municipal politics and funding for 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). Cruising the Dead River explores the queer sexual and artistic cultures of Manhattan’s abandoned waterfront in the late 1970s, when hundreds of queer people cruised the ruined warehouses of Manhattan’s derelict West Side waterfront in search of anonymous erotic pleasure. The book examines how and why the ruined buildings that dominated this queer landscape assumed a powerful erotic role and how a sense of connection between past and present was generated through writing and art-making in or about the piers by artists such as Every Ocean Hughes (also known as Emily Roysdon), Peter Hujar, and Alvin Baltrop.  The decay of the piers and the work they housed provide invaluable insight into the complex forces that reshaped the waterfront in this period as gentrification swept New York and before the AIDS crisis took hold. By telling the story of the piers, Cruising the Dead River documents buried histories of violence, regeneration, and LGBTQ activism that developed in and around the cruising scene. 

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.
 
 

Teaching

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.

Publications