Dr Rosemary Shirley Spoke at the University of Oxford on a panel discussing the National Trust's People's Landscapes programme

Dr Rosemary Shirley is a Senior Lecturer in Art Theory and Practice and Award Tutor for BA(Hons) Art History and Curating at Manchester Metropolitan University. She spoke as a panellist at the People's Landscapes: Creative Landscapes event on 16th May.

The event is called People’s Landscapes: Beyond the Green & Pleasant Land. The event consists of a series of free roundtable events convened by the National Trust Partnership is taking place in Oxford in May and June, 2019, on the theme of ‘People’s Landscapes: Beyond the Green & Pleasant Land.’ You can find out more here.

Dr Rosemary Shirley is a Senior Lecturer in Art Theory and Practice and Award Tutor for BA(Hons) Art History and Curating at Manchester Metropolitan University. She spoke as a panellist at the People's Landscapes: Creative Landscapes event on 16th May.

Her research centres on everyday life and visual culture, with a particular emphasis on contemporary rural contexts. She is interested in how the English landscape might be explored through notions of national identity and discourses of modernity. This has led her to write about topics as diverse as litter, motorways, folk customs and scrapbooks. She is also interested in how contemporary artists engage with landscape as a place that is lived in rather than simply looked at or visited. 

She has published widely on this subject including her monograph Rural Modernity, Everyday Life and Visual Culture (Routledge 2015).

Her most recent curatorial project is Creating the Countryside, a large scale exhibition at Compton Verney (March-June 2017) featuring the work of over 100 artists including Gainsborough, Turner, Constable, Grayson Perry, Ingrid Pollard, Anna Fox, Georgina Barney and Rebecca Chesney.

She is currently working with partners: Whitechapel Gallery, Istanbul Biennial, Wysing Art Centre, Myvillages and Aberystwyth University on a project of events culminating in a conference and publication in 2019 on The Rural: Contemporary Art and Spaces of Connection. 

Rosemary joined the department in Spring 2012. Previous to this she completed her PhD at the University of Sussex where she was supervised by Dr. Ben Highmore. She has an MA in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths and a BA(hons) in Fine Art which she studied at Winchester School of Art and Ontario College of Art and Design. She has taught at Art History at Goldsmiths, Arts Management at Birkbeck and Cultural Studies at Sussex. 

Prior to academia, she worked in a variety of art gallery contexts including Aspex Gallery in Portsmouth where she set up and managed the Artists’ Resource Centre (ARC) to provide high quality professional development opportunities for artists. She has also maintained a long working relationship with AN The Artists Information Company, writing many articles and reviews for AN Magazine and working as an editor for their online critical writing platform interface www.a-n.co.uk/interface. Most recently she has commissioned and edited a series of 10 articles for AN on artists working in rural places.