My current book project in progress examines the constructs of the border and the trace in connection with art using abstraction in Britain since the 1970s, looking at the practices of artists including Rasheed Araeen, Diego Barboza, Sonia Barrett, Frank Bowling, Rita Donagh, and Veronica Ryan, among others. This writing and research for this project has been supported by an AHRC Early Career Leadership Fellowship, through which in 2021 I also co-organised (with Amy Tobin) the event series Grassroots: Artmaking and Political Struggle with Kettle’s Yard Gallery, and co-curated (with Caroline Gausden, Kirsten Lloyd and Nat Raha) the exhibition Life Support: Forms of Care in Art and Activism at Glasgow Women’s Library, which featured work by Kate Davis, Olivia Plender, Greer Lankton, Veronica Ryan, and Alberta Whittle, alongside that of many other practitioners and archival items drawn from GWL collections. A growing strand of research focuses on feminist photographic practices, particularly in relation to the work of the socialist feminist photographer Franki Raffles, and I have a longstanding interest in the abstract painter Jay DeFeo, having organised a study day on the latter’s work at the Terra Foundation for American Art in summer 2019.

Previous publications have traced connections between transnational performance art, embodiment, sociology, psychology, psychoanalysis, cybernetics and system theory. My book Beyond the Happening: Performance Art and the Politics of Communication (Manchester University Press, 2020) examines how artists across Latin America, particularly Argentina, the US and Europe transformed performance art into a site of psycho-social analysis during the 1960s and 1970s. Related articles have appeared in Art History, Art Journal, ARTMargins, Oxford Art Journal, Tate Papers and Parallax. With Jo Applin and Amy Tobin I co-edited London Art Worlds: Mobile, Contingent and Ephemeral Networks, 1960–1980 (Penn State University Press, 2018); I have also co-edited special issues of Tate Papers (2015) and the Journal of Curatorial Studies (2020).

My academic research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, the Yale Centre for British Art, AHRC/UKRI, the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Carnegie Trust and the Leverhulme Trust.

At the University of St Andrews I am the co-director (with Kate Cowcher) of the Centre for Contemporary Art.