Griselda Pollock

Griselda Pollock is Professor emerita of Social and Critical Histories of Art and Director of the Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History (CentreCATH) at the University of Leeds.

From 1977 to 2020, she taught fine art, history of art, film, cultural and feminist studies in the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies. She defines her project as the entanglement of postcolonial, queer, international, social historical and feminist interventions in art’s histories, cultural analysis and  cultural theory.

Born in Bloemfontein, South Africa in 1949, Griselda Pollock grew up and was educated in both French- and English-speaking Canada before moving to Britain in her teens.

She attended Queen’s College in London and then studied Modern History at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford 1967-1970. She did graduate studies in the History of Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London and was awarded an MA (with distinction) in 1972 and a PhD in 1980.

Her dissertation topic was: Van Gogh and Dutch Art: A Study of the Development of Van Gogh’s Notion of Modern Art with special reference to the Critical and Artistic Revival of Seventeenth Century Dutch Art in the Netherlands and France in the Nineteenth Century as a Model for Modern Art.

After teaching at Canterbury School of Art, Reading and Manchester Universities ( 1972-1977), she moved to the University of Leeds in 1977 to work with the Professor of Fine Art, T.J. Clark when Clark was developing graduate studies in The Social History of Art. She directed the MA in the Socia History of Art 1979-1989.

With Janet Wolff, she was a founder of the Centre for Cultural Studies in 1987, becoming its second director (1990 and 2001). 

In 1992, she established and directed the only dedicated graduate studies progamme in Feminism and the Visual Arts.

​

With a major centre grant from the AHRC in 2002, Griselda Pollock became the founding director of the transdisciplinary Centre for Cultural, Analysis, Theory and History whose aim was to place fine art, history of art, cultural studies in postcolonial, social historical, queer, Jewish and feminist transdisciplinary encounters, partly and unfaithfully modelled on the Warburgian project of Kulturwissenschaft and Mieke Bal’s Centre for Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam.

​

Griselda Pollock is the author of many books, edited collections, book chapters, articles and reviews (see CV). She has curated several exhibitions and made four essay/art films.

Having been trained in 19th century European art, she swiftly extended her range of research into twentieth century and contemporary international art curation and historiography, Hollywood cinema and avant-garde feminist cinema, notably the work of Laura Mulvey and Chantal Akerman. ​