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I am Senior Lecturer in Photography and the Photography Course Leader at the School of Art, Design and Architecture, the University of Huddersfield (UK). I was awarded my Ph.D from the History of Art Department at University College London (UCL), specialising in the theory and history of photography in the context of fine art and visual cultures. Prior to my current position, I lectured at UCL and at Chelsea College of Art and Design (University of the Arts London).
I am peer-reviewer for various academic journals, including: TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, as well as The International Journal of the Image, and I am also on the Editorial Advisory Board for Photography and Culture. My individual published research focuses on the participation of vernacular photography in the solidification and subversion of state policies, in the alteration of Middle-Eastern cultural historical topoi, and in acts of political violence. I take particular interest in exploring the various methods by which photographs are set in motion within such contexts as the construction of physical and human landscape, the domestication of militarism, private acts of political protest, and social rituals of mourning and nationalism.
This set of investigations emerged through my earlier career as professional photographer, where I worked as photojournalist and war photographer, recording aspects of the Arab-Israeli conflict in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, Israel, and in South Lebanon. I also collaborated with landscape architects and historians on the production and publication of documentary photo-collections featuring the modification, social restoration and re-habitation of past battlegrounds.
As visual practitioner, I presented my work at a number of art galleries, including Tate Modern (one-day installation), Norwich Art Gallery, The Agency, the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), Machida Municipal Print Museum (Tokyo), Kodeljevo Grad (Slovenia), and Gallery Infra (Sweden).
I am a member of the Association of Art Historians (AAH), College Art Association (CAA), the Association of Photography in Higher Education (APHE), the Association for Historical and Fine Art Photography (AHFAP) and the Ph: The Postgraduate Photography Research Network. In 2011 I was awarded Fellowship status of the British Institute of Professional Photography (BIPP) and of the Higher Education Academy (HEA).
More recently, I began researching the historiographical mode of argumentation utilised in the formation of the “new” history of photography from the 1970s to the present.
