Dr Claudia Tobin, Jesus

ct526@cam.ac.uk

 

Biographical Information

I am a writer, curator and academic. My research and teaching focuses broadly on literature and visual cultures of the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I am a Bye-Fellow at Downing and a Senior Research Associate at the Intellectual Forum, Jesus College. I held a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship in the English Faculty at Cambridge (2017-19), and have held fellowships at the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies (Villa I Tatti) in Florence, the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art and UCL Institute of Advanced Studies in London, LARCA Paris Diderot, and the Huntington Library in California.

My teaching ranges from the late nineteenth century to the contemporary. For the English Tripos, I have taught and lectured on the following: Part IB: Paper 7 a and b (English Literature and its Contexts, 1870 to the present, Modernisms), Part II, Paper 17 (Lyric), Paper 12 (Contemporary Writing), Paper 18 (Literature and Visual Culture), and Parts IB & II: Paper 1 (Practical Criticism and Critical Practice). I ran my seminar course ‘Art Writing, Writing Art: Conversations in Word and Image’ for the MPhil in Modern and Contemporary Literature during 2021-23. I supervise dissertations on nineteenth and twentieth century literature and visual cultures and contribute to teaching in the History of Art Department.

Research Interests

Nineteenth- , twentieth- and twenty-first century literature, modernism; visual cultures; ekphrasis and art writing; plant life, the plant humanities and gardens; modern dance and experimental theatre; colour and chromatic technologies; early twentieth century spirituality and ecological consciousness. I have published widely on art writing, aesthetics and colour, experimental theatre, and Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury.

My first book Modernism and Still Life: Artists, Writers, Dancers (EUP, 2020), explores the genre of ‘still life’ and the potential for movement and transformation in the idea of stillness and the ordinary across different media (in prose, poetry, painting, dance, and sculpture). It investigates constellations of writers, visual artists and dancers including Cézanne, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, David Jones, Winifred Nicholson, Wallace Stevens, and lesser-known figures including Charles Mauron and Margaret Morris. Reviews of the book can be found here and here.  

My current project focuses on garden sanctuaries and the relationship between people and plants in periods of crisis: ‘Seasons of Sanctuary: Retreat and Reinvention in the Garden’. This AHRC funded collaborative project involves curating an exhibition at the Garden Museum in London (opening in May 2024), workshops with garden-based charities, and producing a book of creative non-fiction. Other current projects include a book on colour and the imagination in modern literature and art, and a performance project 'Scoring Suffrage' with the violinist Ruth Palmer, funded by Calliope Arts. 

I am interested in the intersections between environmental activism and art. In 2020 I set up a ‘Green Drawing’ programme for the Royal Drawing School and worked with Cambridge Zero, Think Lab and NHS England on a sustainability project developing creative solutions to support the delivery of net zero for the NHS. I am co-editor of Ways of Drawing: Artists' Perspectives and Practices (Thames & Hudson, 2019), a book which positions drawing as among the most direct ways of engaging with the world; a way not just of seeing, but of understanding what you see. 

My interdisciplinary research is energised by collaborations with museums and galleries. My curatorial experience includes working on the National Portrait Gallery exhibition Virginia Woolf: Art, Life and Vision (2014) and contributing to the exhibition and public programme for Virginia Woolf: An Exhibition Inspired by her Writings (which toured from Tate St Ives to the Fitzwilliam Museum in 2018). Woolf remains central to my research, and I recently edited a collection of her art writings for David Zwirner’s Ekphrasis series.

I frequently collaborate with contemporary artists working across different media. Recent projects have involved working on an exhibition, film and book collaboration with contemporary visual artist William Tillyer and poet Alice Oswald (2018). In 2020 I co-curated the exhibition Jerusalem in Exile (a Times ‘Critics’ Choice’) at West Court Gallery, Cambridge supported by the Centre for Islamic Studies. The exhibition and catalogue explored conjunctions between poetry, colour and architecture in the work of the Palestinian artist Kamal Boullata and Syrian poet Adonis.

 

Selected Publications

Books

• Modernism and Still Life: Writers, Artists, Dancers(Edinburgh University Press, 2020)
• Co-editor, Ways of Drawing: Artists’ Perspectives and Practices, with Julian Bell and Julia Balchin (Thames & Hudson, 2019)
• Oh to be a painter! Editor and author of introduction to the first publication bringing together Virginia Woolf’s essays on the visual arts. Ekphrasis series (David Zwirner Books, 2021)

 

Articles and Essays

• ‘Plant Portraits: Victorian to Modern’, chapter for The Cambridge Handbook of Literature and Plants,  by Bonnie Lander Johnson (CUP, forthcoming 2023)
• ‘Inhaling Colour: Vernon Lee and the Chromatic Body’, Studies in Walter Pater and Aestheticism, no 6 (Autumn 2021)
• ‘Ideals of a Picture Gallery’, chapter in British Literature in Transition 1900-20, ed. James Purdon (CUP, 2021)
• ‘ “An Operator of Colours”: Conversations in Word and Image’, in Jerusalem in Exile: Artist’s Books by Kamal Boullata,  by Elizabeth Key Fowden (Beirut: Dongola Limited Editions, 2020)
• Co-author with Grace Brockington, ‘London’s Little Theatres’, in Theatres of War: Experimental Performance in London, 1914–1918 and Beyond
  ,British Art Studies, 11 (March 2019). Special issue with virtual exhibition, interactive map and film
• ‘ “The active and the contemplative”: Charles Mauron, Virginia Woolf, and Roger Fry’, in Virginia Woolf and the World of Books,  by Nicola Wilson and Claire Battershill (Clemson: Clemson University Press, 2018)
• ‘ “The humbleness of all his objects”: Modern Writers, Cézanne, and Still Life’, in The Humble in 19^th- to 21^st- Century British Literature and Arts,  by Jean-Michel Ganteau, Christine Reynier, Isabelle Brasme (Montpellier: Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée, September 2017)
• ‘Test for Chrome Yellow: the eloquence of colour’, in Grace Brockington (ed.), In Focus: Abstract Painting c. 1914 by Vanessa Bell, Tate Research Publication, 2017
• ‘Decoration, Abstraction and the Influence of Islamic Textiles’, in Grace Brockington (ed.), In Focus: Abstract Painting c. 1914 by Vanessa Bell, Tate Research Publication, 2017, http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/in-focus/abstract-painting-vanessa-bell/decoration-abstraction

 

Art Writing and Exhibition Catalogue Essays:

• ‘And Everything Changed’, catalogue essay for exhibition on Catherine Goodman, Marlborough Fine Art, London (2022)
• ‘Close Encounters: Vernon Lee’, Apollo (November 2021)
• ‘The Light Gets In’, commissioned exhibition catalogue essay, Catherine Goodman: The Light Gets In,Marlborough Fine Art, New York (March 2019)
• ‘Bloomsbury’s Conversation in Colour’, Charleston Press, No.2, essay commissioned for ‘In Colour’ exhibition, Charleston, Sussex (March 2019)
• ‘Doing a mixed bunch in a natural way’: Flower painting and still life’, Ivon Hitchens: Space Through Colour (Pallant House Gallery, 2019)
• ‘Virginia Woolf, Still Life, and Transformation’, in Virginia Woolf: An Exhibition Inspired by her Writings, ed. Laura Smith (London: Tate, 2018)
• “Landscape is Weather”: William Tillyer Painting the Elements,  (London: Bernard Jacobson Gallery, 2018)
• ‘The Last House in the World’, exhibition catalogue essay, in Catherine Goodman: The Last House in the World,Marlborough Fine Art, London (November 2016),
• Fixing Memory: Paul de Monchaux, Sculpture 1986-2013, exhibition catalogue, The Piper Gallery, London (2013)
• Walter Nessler: Post-War Optimist (J & C Marshall-Purves, 2012)