Margaret Iversen

Margaret Iversen is Professor Emerita at the University of Essex where she taught in the History of Art Department. She has published two monographs on the subject of contemporary art and theory: Beyond Pleasure: Freud, Lacan and Barthes, 2007, and Photography, Trace, and Trauma, 2017. As the titles of these book indicate, she has long been interested in psychoanalytic theory and its role in art practice and criticism. She has also enquired into how philosophical reflection has entered art theory and criticism. This interest led her to direct, along with co-investigator Prof. Diarmuid Costello, an interdisciplinary Major Research Project funded by the AHRC on Aesthetics after Photography. The project involved organizing two international symposia and editing associated special issues on the topic for Critical Inquiry and Art History. Another of Iversen’s long-standing concerns has been the history of art history. Her first book was on the turn-of-the-century art historian, Alois Riegl. A book co-authored by Stephen Melville called Writing Art History, 2010, was an attempt to reconnect current writing about art with the history and philosophical foundations of the discipline. More recently, she has been exploring the overlapping fields of art criticism and literature, sometimes called artwriting. Iversen developed this interest co-teaching an MA course on artwriting with Marina Warner. Her recent publications bearing on this topic include ‘The Diaristic Mode in Contemporary Art after Barthes’ and ‘Death and the Found Object: Virginia Woolf, Lucy Skaer and Becky Beasley.’