Dr Pat Simpson

•  Late 19th-21st century Russian, Soviet and post-Soviet cultural discourse, including issues of gender, national and regional identity, and conflicts with Western values;
• The interactions with, and interventions of visual culture into the narratives that embody social or cultural assumptions;
• The ways in which artistic legitimacy is created;
• Issues around the politics of representing, curating and legitimating past and contemporary art – both central/East European and British;
• Issues around the relationships between text, image and narrative;
• Heritage, museums and social politics.

Pat‘s long term research project, entitled ‘Sex and Socialist Realism’, explores constructs of the ideal national body of the so-called New Person in the Stalinist era, focusing particularly on the impact of shifting concepts of eugenics and Darwinism on visual representations of the ideal Soviet body.  This project, which received funding from AHRB Small Grants in the Creative and Performing Arts 2002-3 and 2004-5, has generated a number of international conference papers and articles in scholarly journals including Art History, Oxford Art Journal, Sculpture Journal, Russian Review, the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, and the International Journal of the History of Sport .  She has also published chapters in a number of books including: Work and the Image (2000), Gendering Landscape Art (2000), Hybrid Thought (2003), Art, Ritual, Religion (2003), Art, Sex and Eugenics: Corpus Delecti (2008), The Art of Evolution: Darwin, Darwinisms and Visual Culture (2009) and The Visual in Sport (2011).   Art, Sex and Eugenics won a ‘book of the year’ award from the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand in 2009. Pat recieved a British Academy Small Grant 2011-12, for a spin-off project entitled: 'Art and Evolutionary Biopolitics: The Moscow Darwin Museum in the 1920s-1930s.'

• Histories of late 19^th-21^st century fine art in the western hemisphere;
• Issues around representation of gender, identity and nationality;
• Modernist and Postmodernist critical theory;
• Curatorial practices;
• Development and politics of the western art market.

• Writing exhibition catalogues both for UH Galleries and for the British-based Ukrainian art dealers, Danusha Fine Art;
• Member of the UH Heritage Hub;
• AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award in conjuction with the National Trust at Shaw’s Corner, Hertfordshire;
• Mentor for the AHRC funded 'Connected Communities' project of the UH Heritage Hub, and School of Creative Arts representative for heritage issues.