Dr Linda Pittwood
Research assistant in the School of Art, Design and Architecture, University of Huddersfield
- Email:
- L.Pittwood@hud.ac.uk
Dr Linda Jean Pittwood was awarded a PhD in Critical Theory and Cultural Studies from The University of Nottingham in 2019 and is currently Research Assistant in Art and Visual Culture at the University of Huddersfield. Her thesis is titled Inscribing women onto bodies: an encounter with performance, photography and video art from Beijing and Shanghai 1999-2016.
Dr Pittwood’s thesis re-assessed the work of seven well-known artists based in the PRC to argue for attention to gendered subjectivity, practices of 'speaking the truth' onto bodies, and question what is at stake in practices of gendered meaning-making. The theoretical framework combined Michel Foucault's category of 'biopower' with turn of the 20th-century anarcho feminist He-Yin Zhen's 'nannü'. This enabled attention to the flows of power that discipline the body, manage populations and produce the binary categories women/men. To collect data, she used an approach of 'the encounter,' which foregrounds the role of the researcher and the transformational potential of encounters with artists, art, place and the archive.
Dr Pittwood has published in the journals Modern China Studies and the Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art. Her new research is a collaboration with Dr Rachel Marsden, Lecturer in Practice Research University of the Arts, London (UAL). Dr Pittwood and Dr Marsden in the project 'Gender Scars' are interested in the outputs of female artists of the Chinese diaspora and their work relating to skin, scars, trauma and wellbeing.
Prior to undertaking her PhD, Dr Pittwood was Exhibition Officer for Art Galleries at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool 2009-2015. Dr Pittwood is an award winning art critic who has written for corridor8, Yishu Shijie, aesthetica, double negative and Yishu Journal of Contemporary Art as well as writing for and editing catalogues and artist monographs.