Amy Tobin
BA (York), MA (Courtauld Institute of Art), PhD (York)
College roles
Fellow (D)
Director of Studies in History of Art (Part I; IIA; IIB)
Postgraduate Mentor
University roles
Associate Professor in History of Art
Curator of Contemporary Programmes, Kettle’s Yard
Biography
At Cambridge, I teach modern and contemporary art across the History of Art Tripos, and convene a module on Representation and Recognition in Contemporary Art.
I am the author of Women Artists Together: Art in the Age of Women’s Liberation (Yale, 2023) and my research has focused on histories of feminism and art, and more broadly on radical forms of relation and the politics of togetherness in modern and contemporary art.
I have written on numerous artists including Helen Chadwick, Rose English, Rose Garrard, Eva Hesse, Candace Hill-Montgomery, Alexis Hunter, Suzanne Lacy, Linder, Rosemary Mayer, Julie Mehretu, Howardena Pindell, Cecilia Vicuña, Jo Spence and Hannah Wilke, and curated exhibitions on Louise Bourgeois, Julie Mehretu, Ian Giles, Rose Garrard, Linder, Sutapa Biswas, Howardena Pindell and Li Yuan-chia at Kettle’s Yard, where I am a curator. I also regularly write art criticism for Burlington Contemporary.
Dr Tobin is a co-Director of Cambridge Visual Culture (https://www.cvc.cam.ac.uk/), which aims to connect researchers and practitioners working on the visual throughout Cambridge. She also serves on the Higher Education Committee of the Association for Art History.
I welcome applications for graduate study on feminism and art, art and political struggle in the later twentieth and twenty-first centuries, histories of women artists, trans studies and art, queer art and theory, artist publishing, artist moving image.
Research Interests
Dr Tobin’s research has focused on histories of feminism and art (broadly understood), as well as the methodologies of feminist art histories. She is committed to an inclusive feminism, as well as to researching adjacent political and epistemological struggles. Her book Women Artists Together: Art in the Age of Women’s Liberation focused on the politics of collaboration and collectivity, which is another research interest. She has published widely on this elsewhere, as well as on other topics, visit her profile of the History of Art webpages to find out more.
She is currently co-I on the AHRC-IRC-funded oral history project Feminist Art Making Histories.