Tim Barringer
B.A., Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge
M.A., Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
D.Phil., University of Sussex
Tim Barringer is Paul Mellon Professor of the History of Art. He specializes in the art of Britain and the British Empire since 1700, nineteenth-century American art, and art and music. Following positions at the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Universities of London and Birmingham in Great Britain, he came to Yale in 1998. In 2009 Tim Barringer was Slade Professor at the University of Cambridge. In 2013-14 he held a J. Clawson Mills Fellowship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. In 2019 he delivered the Paul Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery in London. He has held visiting professorships at York and Bristol Universities in the UK.
His books include Reading the Pre-Raphaelites (Yale, 1998), Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain (Yale, 2005) and David Hockney: 82 Portraits and 1 Still Life (Royal Academy, 2016). He is completing a book titled Broken Pastoral: Art and Music in Britain.
With co-editors Geoff Quilley and Douglas Fordham, he published Art and the British Empire in 2007. In 2018, a collection of essays Victorian Jamaica, co-edited with Wayne Modest, was published by Duke University Press. On the Viewing Platform: The Panorama from Canvas to Screen, co-edited with Katie Trumpener, appeared with Yale University Press in 2020. Other co-edited collections of essays include Colonialism and the Object; Frederic Leighton: Antiquity, Renaissance, Modernity, and Writing the Pre-Raphaelites. A forthcoming collection of essays, Taj of the Raj: The Victoria Memorial, will be co-edited with Romita Ray.
Barringer was curator with Andrew Wilton, American Sublime: Landscape Painting in the United States, 1825-1880 (London: Tate; Philadelphia, Minneapolis, 2002). With Gillian Forrester and Barbaro Martinez-Ruiz, he curated Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and his Worlds, (Yale, 2007). The accompanying book was awarded the Alfred Barr Prize of the College Art Association. With Alison Smith and Jason Rosenfeld, he curated Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde at Tate Britain, London; National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; Pushkin Museum, Moscow; Mori Arts Center, Toyko, and Palazzo Chiablese, Turin, 2012-13. He was curator of Pastures Green and Dark, Satanic Mills at Princeton University Art Museum and other US venues in 2015-16. In 2018 he was curator, with Elizabeth Kornhauser, of Thomas Cole’s Journey: Atlantic Crossings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Gallery in London. He also worked with a Yale team to curate Picturesque and Sublime: Thomas Cole’s Transatlantic Inheritance at the Thomas Cole Historic Site in Catskill, NY, and in 2019 he curated Unto This Last: Two Hundred Years of John Ruskin with Tara Contractor, Victoria Hepburn Judith Stapleton and Courtney S. Long (Yale Center for British Art and Watts Gallery). In 2019-22 an exhibition co-curated with Victoria Osborne and Martin Ellis, Radical Victorians toured the USA. All these exhibitions were accompanied by publications. He is a member of the curatorial team for Preraffaelliti: Un Rinascimento Moderno / Pre-Raphaelites: A Modern Renaissance, to be presented at the Musei di San Domenico in Forlì (Emilia Romagna, Italy) in 2024.
Tim Barringer has served as advisor or co-advisor for 31 completed Ph.D. dissertations at Yale, served as Director of Undergraduate Studies, Director of Graduate Studies and, for six years until 2021, as Chair of the History of Art Department. He was winner of the Sarai Ribicoff teaching prize in 2004.
Selected recent publications include “Pre-Raphaelite Visions and Edwardian Modernities” in Alice Eden, ed., Modern Pre-Raphaelite Visionaries (Leamington and Compton, exhibition catalogue, 2022); “Foreword” in Geoff Kaplan, ed., After the Bauhaus, Before the Internet: A History of Graphic Design Pedagogy (Los Angeles: No Place Press, 2022); “Intersectional Albertopolis” in Rachel Bryant Davies and Erin Johnson-Williams, Intersectional Encounters in the Nineteenth-Century Archive: New Essays on Power and Discourse (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022); “Decolonizing Art and Empire”, jointly written with Charlene Villaseñor Black, forthcoming, Art Bulletin, Spring 2022; “Racial Capitalism and the Ragged Man,” in Iris Moon, ed., “The Chelsea Porcelain Case, British Galleries, The Metropolitan Museum of Art”, British Art Studies, Issue 21, https://doi.org/10.17658/issn.2058-5462/issue-21/oneobject and “Empire Mourning,” British Art and Empire, special issue of Art History, 2022, https://arthistoryjournal.org.uk/issues/june-2022/. Forthcoming publications including “Visual Art” in Vaughan Williams in Context, edited by Julian Onderdonck and Ceri Owen for Cambridge University Press.
BLOGPOSTS:
Art History is a Global Discipline (2020) https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2020/02/06/art-history-is-a-global-discipline
A Personal Canon (2020) https://yalebooks.yale.edu/2020/05/14/a-personal-canon-tim-barringer-on-five-influential-texts/
Race and Place (2019) https://huntington.org/verso/race-and-place-19th-century-new-york- state;
Hudson River Crossings (2015) https://www.apollo-magazine.com/hudson-river-school-american-landscape-painting/.
SELECTED LECTURES ONLINE:
‘Why We Need Ruskin Now’ (2019); https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcbMTRk7LRs;
‘Thomas Cole and the White Atlantic’ (2019) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-ahOJuZzq4;
‘Victorian Radicals Today’ (2019) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8MSoH_3LTDE;
‘Ford Madox Brown: Work’ (2012) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uc2xgyjxKHg
Areas of PhD supervision include: British Art since 1700; Victorian visual culture; Art of the British Empire, especially the Anglophone Caribbean, Australasia and Indian subcontinent; American nineteenth-century painting; museum history.