Harvard College (BA, 1983), School of Visual Arts (MFA, 1987), Graduate Center of the City University of New York (PhD, 1997)


Contact details

The 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

 

Professor Mignon Nixon
Professor Mignon Nixon is on research leave in 2010-11 as a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, where she is researching feminist artistic responses to the US war in Vietnam. In 2011-12 she will teach the MA Special Option “Art and Psychoanalysis: Fifty Years of War in the Time of Peace, 1960-2010” with the psychoanalyst and theorist Professor Juliet Mitchell. This course is supported by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to foster interdisciplinary research-led teaching.

She was appointed Lecturer in American Art at The Courtauld in 1996, having previously taught at Bard College MA Program in Curatorial Studies. Her research interests centre on the interaction of art, feminism, psychoanalysis, and gender politics.

Mignon Nixon is the author of Fantastic Reality: Louise Bourgeois and a Story of Modern Art (MIT Press/October Books, 2005) and the editor of the Eva Hesse October File (MIT Press/October Files, 2002). She is a co-editor of October magazine (New York). Her work has been supported by a Getty Postdoctoral Fellowship, a Clark Fellowship, and a Radcliffe Fellowship, and she has been a Senior Scholar at the Terra Foundation, Giverny.

At The Courtauld, Mignon Nixon has supervised 18 doctoral projects, 14 to completion. She is particularly interested in supervising research on topics in art since 1960 involving histories and theories of feminism, subjectivity, sexuality, and war.

Mignon Nixon has taught an MA Special Option at The Courtauld since 1996, most recently “Informed: Art, Sex, War, and Gender Politics Since 1960.” She has taught BA courses on “The Duchamp Effect,” “Louise Bourgeois and Modern Art,” “American Art 1945-1972,” “Artists’ Writings,” and “Contemporary Art in London.” She has served as associate dean and head of the research programme.


Recent and forthcoming Publications


“Infinity Politics,” in Yayoi Kusama exhibition catalogue, ed. Frances Morris, Tate Modern (2011).

“Book of Tongues,” in Nancy Spero: Dissidances. Barcelona and Madrid: Museu d’Art Contemporáni and Museu National Centro de Art Reina Sofia, 2008, pp. 21-53.

“Spero’s Curses,” October 122 (Fall 2007), pp. 3-30.

“War Inside/War Outside: Feminist Critiques and the Politics of Psychoanalysis,” Texte zur Kunst, vol. 17, no. 68 (December 2007), pp. 65-75, pp. 134-138.

“o + x,” October 119 (Winter 2007), pp. 6-20.

“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, 2006), pp. 275-303.

”’Child Drawing,’” in Eva Hesse Drawing, ed. Catherine de Zegher (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), pp. 27-56.

“Dream Dust,” October 116 (Spring 2006), pp.63-86.

“On the Couch,” October 113 (Summer 2005), pp. 39-76.

 

doctoral research projects supervised include


  • ‘Invisible Painting: Mimetic Pictorialism in Postmodern New York, 1977-1987’, PhD awarded 2006.
  • ‘Narrating the Family Romance: Passion and Power in the Work of Paula Rego, 1990-2001’, PhD awarded 2006.
  • ‘Different Girls: performances of adolescence in contemporary photographic portraits'. PhD awarded 2007.
  • ‘Women’s Collaborations in the Visual Arts (US, UK, Canada, 1970-2003)’. PhD awarded 2007.
  • ‘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).
  • ‘Touching the Dead: Performance, Testimony, Writing and Death’. PhD awarded 2007.
  • ‘The Avant-Garde as Swain? The Perpetually Outmoded and the Pastoral Attitude in the United States, 1950-1965’.
  • ‘The Adolescent Condition: A Report on Postmodernism’.
  • ‘Framing Reception: The Biographical Discourses of Hesse, Mendieta and Wieland’.
  • ‘The Art of Walter De Maria, 1960-2001’.
  • ‘Hair in the work of contemporary women artists’.


Keywords


Feminism; Gender; Psychoanalysis; Sexuality; War; War Protest; Vietnam War; Peace.