Directory

Dr. Curzon joined the department in 2007. She teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on modern and contemporary art, and contemporary practice and community engagement. Her current research focuses on national identity and visual culture, particularly relating to the interwar, wartime and early postwar periods in Great Britain. She has also published on contemporary portrait painting. 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).

Dr. Curzon has been named to a three-year term as a UA College of Arts and Sciences Leadership Board Faculty Fellow (2018-2020). 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 Director of Graduate Studies for Art History and serves as Editor-in-Chief for FutureForward: the Journal of Integrative Teaching International and serves on the Mass Observation Critical Series Editorial Board by Bloomsbury Academic Publishing.

Courses Taught

• ARH 385: Early 20th Century Art
• ARH 381: Art Since World War II
• ARH 400W: Photographic Discourse
• ARH 481: Topics in 20th Century Art
• ARH 580: Graduate Seminar in Modern and Contemporary Art
• ARH 402/502: Paul R. Jones K-12 Fellowship Program
• ARH 501: Interdisciplinary Graduate Seminar

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

• 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

• “Mass-Observation, Visuality, and the De-sacralization of Modernism,” Mass Observation 80th Anniversary Conference, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK, July 2017
• “Social Justice in the Arts: Teaching Sassafras” (with Prof. Adrienne Callander), Pave Biennial Symposium, Herberger Institute, Arizona State University, May 2017
• “Visualizing the Home Front: Evelyn Dunbar at War,” North American Conference on British Studies (NACBS), Washington DC, November 2016
• “Just Ordinary? Visualizing LGBTQ+ Families in the Photographs of Catherine Opie,” Alliance for the Study of Adoption and Culture Annual Conference, Minneapolis MN, October 2016
• “Cultivating Active Citizenship through the Arts in the 21st Century” (with Dr. Wendy Castenell), Blackburn Symposium, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, August 2016
• “Picturing Lives and Imagining Nations: Humphrey Jennings and Mass-Observation,” Social History Society 40th Annual Conference, Lancaster UK, March 2016
• “Women Artists at War: Gender, Modernism, and National Identity, 1939-1945,” Northeast Conference on British Studies (NECBS), Ottawa ON, October 2015