Directory

Dr. Curzon joined the department in 2007. She teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on modern and contemporary art. Her current research focuses on gender, national identity, and visual culture, particularly relating to the interwar, wartime and early postwar periods in Great Britain and Western Europe. She also publishes on contemporary queer portraiture and representations of queer kinship. In 2018, she received the Historians of British Artist Book Award for Exemplary Scholarship on the Period after 1800 for her book, Mass-Observation and Visual Culture: Depicting Everyday Lives in Britain (Routledge, 2017).

In 2019, Dr. Curzon received the Morris L. Mayer Award for her “selfless and significant service and leadership for the UA community and significant contributions to student life and integrity.”

Dr. Curzon holds a BA in British History from the University of Kings College (Halifax) and a PhD in Visual and Cultural Studies from the University of Rochester. She also holds a graduate certificate in Women’s and Gender Studies. She is Graduate Program Director for Art HIstory, serves on the Executive Committee for the Alliance for the Study of Adoption & Culture (ASAC), and is a member of the Mass Observation Critical Series Editorial Board for Bloomsbury Academic Publishing and an advisory board member of  the Formations: Adoption, Kinship, and Culture book series for ASAC/the Ohio State University Press.

Courses Taught

• ARH 253: Survey II
• ARH 385: Early 20^th Century Art
• ARH 381: Art Since World War II
• ARH 400W: Photographic Discourse
• ARH 481: Topics in 20^th Century Art
• ARH 580: Graduate Seminar in Modern and Contemporary Art
• ARH 501: Interdisciplinary Graduate Seminar

Current Projects

• Art and Citizenship in Conflict: British Women War Artists, 1939-45 (under contract with Manchester University Press, UK)
• The Historical Contexts and Contemporary Uses of Mass-Observation: 1930s to the Present (with co-editor Dr. Benjamin Jones; under contract with Bloomsbury Academic UK)

Recently Published

• “MaPa Del: Visualizing Queer Kinship,” Adoption and Culture, Vol. 8, No. 1, 2020. Guest editor for the issue (Visual Adoptions) and author of introduction: “Visualizing Kinship: Politics, Challenges, Opportunities.”
• “Visualising the Home Front: Evelyn Dunbar and Wartime Citizenship” in Oxford Art Journal, vol. 41, issue. 3 (1 December 2018): 341–360.
• Mass-Observation and Visual Culture: Depicting Everyday Lives in Britain (New York: Routledge, 2017).
  Awarded the 2018 Historians of British Artist Book Award for Exemplary Scholarship on the Period after 1800
• “Unprofessional Painting: Mass-Observation, Modern Art, and Everyday Life,” in Porous Boundaries: Art and Essays, eds. David Peters Corbett and Cyril Reade (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2015).
• “Another Place in Time: Documenting Blackpool for Mass-Observation in the 1930s,” History of Photography 35, no. 3 (2011): 313-326.
• “Painting a Queer Nation: Sadie Lee and Mandy McCartin,” Visual Culture in Britain 12, no. 1 (2011): 97-115.

Recent Grants and Awards

• Leadership Board Faculty Fellow, College of Arts and Sciences, Fall 2018 to Fall 2021
• Research Support Grant, College Academy of Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity (CARSCA), Fall 2016-Fall 2017
• Research Support Grant, Research Grants Committee (RGC), The University of Alabama, Spring 2016-Spring 2018\
• Research Support Grant, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art (London, UK) Spring 2016-Spring 2017

Recent and Upcoming Conference Presentations

• “Portraiture as Subversion: Defining Heroism in the Second World War,” Southeastern College Art Conference (SECAC), Baltimore, MD, October 2022
• “WAAFs are not to carry arms’: (Mis)Remembering Corporal Daphne Pearson, RAF Museum Conference 2022, Royal Air Force Museum, London, UK, September 2022
• “Anthropologizing Art’s History? The Uses of Mass-Observation,” Northeast Conference on British Studies (NECBS), October 2021
• “Representing Violence: Laura Knight’s The Nuremberg Trial (1946),” Southeastern College Art Conference (SECAC), December 2020
• “Living in Queer Time: The Photographs of Del LaGrace Volcano,” Southeastern College Art Conference (SECAC), Chattanooga TN, October 2019.
• ‘”One Hates to Miss the Raids”: Women War Artists in the Blitz,’ Northeast Conference on British Studies (NECBS), McGill University, Montreal QC, October 2019.
• “Vision, Visuality, Mass-Observation,” North American Conference on British Studies (NACBS), Providence RI, October 2018