Griselda Pollock: Warburg and Mnemosyne: The Photograph as Aide-Mémoire or Optical Unconscious

In this lecture Griselda Pollock will talk about her theoretical interests in the issues of photographs, art history, archives and memory. The lecture will focus on Warburg's atlas and its uses then and now with reference to photographic theory and memory theory.

Griselda Pollock was born in South Africa in 1949 and grew up in both French and English Canada. Coming to Britain in her teens she studied Modern History at Oxford University (1967-1970) and History of European Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art (1970-72) and she was awarded her doctorate in 1980 for a study of Vincent Van Gogh and Dutch Art: A reading of his notions of the modern. After teaching at Reading and Manchester universities, she came to Leeds in 1977 as Lecturer in History of Art and Film and was appointed to a Personal Chair in Social and Critical Histories of Art in 1990. In 2001 she became Director of Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History (CentreCATH). Griselda Pollock's main research interests are in the issues of gender, race and class in the formations of modernism in late nineteenth century Europe and America; the history of women in the visual arts with a current project focusing on femininity, representation and modernity 1928-1968; the work of Vincent van Gogh; women's cinema 1940-9; the legend of Tarzan: myths of empire, identity and place, contemporary visual arts by women. Her new research areas include issues of trauma, history and memory after the Holocaust and Jewish Art and Modernity.