Edward Christie

Academic position: PhD Research Student

Department: History of Art

Biography:

Through my doctoral project, I am working to reform post-war modern art history in the light of critical discourse on the environment, which has proliferated in recent years with the wide acceptance of the Anthropocene thesis and the popularisation of climate activism. Fundamentally, I ask the following question: ‘What would it mean to interrogate post-war modern art history through the prism of a contemporary environmentalist perspective?’. My answers centre on the conviction that art history essentially involves the critical analysis and transformation of the conditions of subjectivity as expressly manifested in artworks, and that an environmentalist approach to the discipline could therefore point towards fundamental and holistic means of responding to the climate crisis.

Research Projects:

Initiatives:

Cultural Ecology: Galvanising Climate Action Across the Arts, Seminar Host.

Based at UCL Anthropocene, the Cultural Ecology seminar programme unites activist-academics working across the arts to interrogate the following question: ‘How might cultural researchers galvanise more urgent and effective responses to the climate crisis to remedy the severe inadequacy of the actions currently being set into motion by governments and corporations?’

Environment Domain Early-career Network (EDEN), co-Chair.

The Environment Domain Early Career Network (EDEN) provides support to researchers in the early stages of their career in environmental research at UCL.
Through my work with EDEN I have been promoting interdisciplinary discourse on environmental issues between early-career UCL academics from arts and sciences backgrounds.

Past Imperfect Seminar, Steering Group Member.

Past Imperfect is a visual culture seminar based in the History of Art Department at UCL. We share concerns with the past and its place in the present, a present increasingly overinvested in the value of the contemporary.
I took a leading role in developing last year’s programme, which was centred on the theme of ‘Activation’. Among events, I helped to organise a series of short lectures on the relationship between art and protest movements, for which I gave a presentation on how contemporary documentary artists are responding to extractivist crimes in Latin America.

Presentations:

"Rasheed Araeen's 'Ecoaesthetics'", Environment, Ecology, Sustainability, The Slade School of Fine Art, March 26, 2021.
“Towards an Eco-Logical Ontology: Mobilising Agnes Denes’ Pyramid Series Against the Climate Crisis”, Art History in Climate Change, The Courtauld Institute of Art, June 26, 2020.

Publications:

"Climate in Crisis: Environmental Change in the Indigenous Americas,” Object, December 3, 2020.
"Art and the Climate Crisis,” Burlington Contemporary, January 2, 2020,
"Art History in the Anthropocene,” Anthroposphere: The Oxford Climate Review, June 11, 2019.