Contact details

Courtauld Institute of Art

Somerset House

Strand

London

WC2R 0RN

 

+44 (0)20 7848 2741 (direct line and messages)

Fax  +44 (0)20 7848 2410

mignon.nixon@courtauld.ac.uk

 

Mignon Nixon was educated at Harvard University (BA 1983), the School of Visual Arts, New York (MFA in Sculpture 1987) and the Graduate Center, City University of New York (PhD in art history 1997). Before coming to the Courtauld as the first Lecturer in the History of American Art in 1996, she taught in the MA Program in Curatorial Studies at Bard College and was the Managing Editor of October. Since 2000, she has served on the editorial board of October. She became Professor of Art History at the Courtauld in 2006, and will serve as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, with special responsibility for research degrees, from Autumn 2007.

 

Research/interests

 

Mignon Nixon writes on post-war and contemporary art in a theoretical perspective and is especially interested in questions of feminism, subjectivity and gender. She is the author of Fantastic Reality: Louise Bourgeois and a Story of Modern Art (2005), the editor of an anthology of critical essays on the art of Eva Hesse (October File, 2002) and the co-editor of The Duchamp Effect (1996). Her current project, Transference and the ‘Woman Artist’, proposes the dynamic of transference as a framework through which to explore the historical formation of the ‘woman artist’, and to consider ways in which the discourses of feminism and post-feminism are now contested among generations of women. She has also published recently on the psychoanalytic couch and the house museum. Nixon’s research has been supported by a Getty Post-doctoral Fellowship (1999-2000) and a fellowship at the Clark Art Institute (2006). She was a Terra Foundation for the Arts Senior Scholar in Summer 2007.

 

Mignon Nixon is very actively involved in doctoral supervision and warmly welcomes applications from new students whenever places are available. An index of current and completed doctoral projects can be found below.

 

Programmes taught during the current year

 

MA Special Option, ‘Theory in Practice: Postmodernism in New York’

3rd Year BA, ‘Louise Bourgeois and Modern Art’

2nd Year BA, ‘Artists’ Writings’ (with Catherine Grant)

Graduate Diploma, ‘Artists’ Writings’ (with Catherine Grant)


Events organised during the current year

 

Louise Bourgeois symposium, Tate Modern, 27 October 2007.

Autumn 2007
Modern and Contemporary Section Research Seminars
Dates and titles can be found on the Research Forum page.

 

Publications


Forthcoming

 

‘Spero’s Curses’, October 122 (Autumn 2007).

‘Louise Bourgeois: Reconstructing the Past’, exhibition catalogue, Louise Bourgeois, Tate Modern (Autumn 2007).

Published in 2007

‘o + x’, October 119 (Winter 2007).

 

‘Melanie Klein’, Art: Key Contemporary Thinkers, ed. Diarmuid Costello and Jonathan Vickery (Oxford: Berg, 2007).

Published in 2006

‘The She Fox: Transference and the “Woman Artist”’, in Women Artists at the Millennium, ed. Carol Armstrong and Catherine de Zegher (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press/October Books), pp. 275-303. ISBN 0-262-01226-X.

 

‘Dream Dust’, October 116 (Spring 2006), pp. 63-86.

 

‘Child Drawing’, in Eva Hesse Drawing, ed. Catherine de Zegher (New York and New Haven: The Drawing Center and Yale University Press), pp. 27-56. ISBN 0300116187.

 

‘Eva Hesse: A Note on Milieu’, in Sculpture and Psychoanalysis, ed. Brandon Taylor (Leeds: Henry Moore Foundation and Ashgate), pp. 161-176. ISBN 0-7546-0984-7

 

Published in 2005

Fantastic Reality: Louise Bourgeois and a Story of Modern Art (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press/October Books). ISBN 0-262-14089-6. Sample chapter available online at http://mitpress.mit.edu.

 

‘On the Couch’, October 113 (Summer 2005), pp. 39-76.

 

‘A Conversation with Juliet Mitchell’, with Tamar Garb, October 113 (Summer 2005), pp. 9-26.

 

‘Introduction’, October 113 (Summer 2005), pp. 3-8.

 

Published in 2004

‘Oral Histories: Silvia Kolbowski and the Dynamics of Transference’, in Silvia Kolbowski:  inadequate . . . Like . . Power (Vienna and Cologne: Secession and Walter Koenig Books), pp. 94-102. ISBN 3-88375-894-9

 

‘What’s So Funny about Fetishism?’ in Everyday Extraordinary: Encountering Fetishism with Marx, Freud, and Lacan, ed. Christopher M. Gemerchak (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2004), pp. 97-115.

 

Published in 2003

‘Eva Hesse Retrospective: A Note on Milieu’, October 104 (Spring 2003), pp. 149-156.

 

Published in 2002

Eva Hesse (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press/October Files). Editor. ISBN 0-262-64049-X

 

‘Ringaround Arosie: 2 in 1’, in Eva Hesse October File, pp. 195-218.

 

‘Seeing Hesse’, Sculpture Journal, vol. VIII (2002), pp. 96-98.

 

‘Psycho-Phallus: Qu’est-ce que c’est?’ in A Companion to Art Theory, ed. Paul Smith and Carolyn Wilde (Oxford: Blackwell), chapter 32, pp. 397-408.  ISBN 0-631-20762-7

 

Published in 2001

‘Round Table: Tate Modern’, October 98 (Fall 2001), pp. 3-25.

 

‘Richard/Lolita’, Présumés Innocents, capcMusee d’art contemporain de Bordeaux.

 

Published in 2000

‘Posing the Phallus’, October 92 (Spring 2000), pp. 99-127.

 

Published in 1999

Louise Bourgeois Special Issue, Oxford Art Journal, vol. 22, no. 2. Guest editor.

 

‘Eating Words’, Oxford Art Journal, vol. 22, no. 2, pp. 55-70.

 

Published in 1998

‘After Images’, October 83 (Winter 1998), pp. 115-130.

 

‘Louise Bourgeois’, Encyclopedia of Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 302-307.

 

Published in 1996

The Duchamp Effect (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press). Co-edited with Martha Buskirk.

 

‘The Gnaw and the Lick: Orality in Recent Feminist Art’, Janine Antoni, activats esculturals (Barcelona: Fundació La Caixa, 1996). Reprinted in Art and Feminism, ed. Helena Reckitt (London: Phaidon, 2001), pp. 275-76.

 

Published in 1995

feminist issueS, October 71, special issue, co-edited with Silvia Kolbowski.

 

‘Bad Enough Mother’, October 71 (Winter 1995), pp. 71-92.

 

‘A Conversation on Recent Feminist Art Practices’, October 71 (Winter 1995), pp. 49-69.

 

Published in 1992

‘You Thrive on Mistaken Identity’, October 60 (Spring 1992), pp. 58-81.

 

Published in 1991

‘Pretty as a Picture: Louise Bourgeois’s Fillette’, Parkett 27 (1991), pp. 48-53.

 

Current and completed doctoral research projects supervised

 

Anna Dezeuze, ‘The “Do-It-Yourself Artwork”: Spectator Participation and the Dematerialization of the Art Object, New York and Rio de Janiero, 1958-1967’, PhD awarded 2003.

 

Paula Feldman, ‘Made to Order: American Minimal Art in the Netherlands, Late 1960s to early 1970s’ (co-supervised with Christopher Green), PhD awarded 2004.

 

Anna Lovatt, ‘Seriality and Systematic Thought in Drawing, 1966-1976’, PhD awarded 2005.

 

Jerzy Kierkuc-Bielinski, ‘Confinement and Illusions of Freedom: The Dialogue between Polish and American Conceptual Art’, PhD awarded 2005

 

Antony Hudek, ‘Invisible Painting: Mimetic Pictorialism in Postmodern New York, 1977-1987’, PhD awarded 2006.

 

Ruth Rosengarten, ‘Narrating the Family Romance: Passion and Power in the Work of Paula Rego, 1990-2001’, PhD awarded 2006.

 

Grant, Catherine, ‘Different Girls: performances of adolescence in contemporary photographic portraits'. PhD awarded 2007.

 

Judith Batalion, ‘Women’s Collaborations in the Visual Arts (US, UK, Canada, 1970-2003)’. PhD awarded 2007.

 

Adele Tan, ‘Embodying Eros, Ethics and Justice: Situating the Stakes of Performance Art and Its Challenges in China’ (partly co-supervised with Dr Henry Zhao, SOAS, University of London).

Dominic Johnson, ‘Touching the Dead: Performance, Testimony, Writing and Death’. PhD awarded 2007.


James Boaden, ‘The Avant-Garde as Swain? The Perpetually Outmoded and the Pastoral Attitude in the United States, 1950-1965’.

Kate Random Love, ‘The Adolescent Condition: A Report on Postmodernism’.

Kristin Patterson, ‘Framing Reception: The Biographical Discourses of Hesse, Mendieta and Wieland’.

Kathleen Campagnolo, ‘The Art of Walter De Maria, 1960-2001’.

Shir Aloni, ‘Hair in the work of contemporary women artists’ (co-supervised with Caroline Arscott).