View to the U: An eye on UTM research

Abstract

This is an audio recording from the podcast series "View to the U: An eye on UTM research".In this episode Professor John Paul Ricco from UofT Mississauga’s Department of Visual Studies talks about his art and art history research, and also about how past health crises have shaped art movements. We also talk about some of the ways in which this current pandemic may influence artists now and in creations to come, and what kinds of things John Paul is doing in this time of solitude. John Paul is an art historian and queer theorist whose interdisciplinary research, teaching and writing draws connections between late-twentieth-century and contemporary art and architecture; continental philosophy; and issues of gender and sexuality, bodies and pleasures, pornography and eroticism. He graduated from New York University where he majored in art history and minored in Medieval and Renaissance Studies. After a couple of years lecturing for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, John Paul went on to complete a PhD in the Theory, Historiography and Criticism of Art History at the University of Chicago. During his doctoral studies at Chicago, Ricco was a Graduate Exchange Scholar in the School of Architecture at Princeton University. As a young scholar in the early-1990s, John Paul contributed to the formation of three newly emerging fields of study: Gay and Lesbian Art History, Visual Culture, and Queer Theory, and he was one of the first scholars to bring questions of space, geography and architecture to bear upon the discourses of queer theory and the politics of AIDS. John Paul joined the Visual Studies department at UTM in 2006