University of Central Lancashire

Emeritus, Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Science

Emeritus Professor of Art History

About

Steve Baker is Emeritus Professor of Art History at the University of Central Lancashire, and is the author of The Postmodern Animal (Reaktion Books), Picturing the Beast: Animals, Identity, and Representation (Illinois UP), and, with the Animal Studies Group, Killing Animals (Illinois UP).  Chapters from his books have been reprinted in Routledge’s Animals and Society: Critical Concepts in the Social Sciences; in Berg’s The Animals Reader: The Essential Classic and Contemporary Writings; and in the exhibition catalogue ZOO~ (European Centre for Contemporary Art, Brussels).  Baker has lectured widely on his research in North America and Australia, and selected publications have been translated into French, German, Dutch and Swedish.

Resident in Norwich since 2008, he is an artist-member of Outpost (an artist-run gallery in the city) and a trustee of the Norfolk Contemporary Art Society.

LATEST:  Steve Baker’s new book, which explores contemporary art’s engagement with questions of animal life through detailed case studies of individual artists’ practices over the past decade, is titled ARTIST|ANIMAL.  It will be published by the University of Minnesota Press in January 2013, as part of their “Posthumanities” series.  ISBN 978-0-8166-8067-2  http://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/artist-animal
And from 10 May 2012, work from Baker's "Roadside" series will be shown as part of the group exhibition "Us and Them: Umwelten" at Project Space in Melbourne (until 7 June).  He will also be showing work in the "Norfolk Contemporary Art 2012" exhibition in Norwich in July.

TALKS, WRITINGS AND ART PROJECTS, 2012:  Baker will speak at the international conference “Activating Stilled Lives: The Aesthetics and Politics of Specimens on Display” (UCL, London, 17-19 May), and at the "Cosmopolitan Animals" conference in London in October.  New work from his "Norfolk Roadkill, Mainly" series will be featured in the second issue of the journal Tierstudien, on the theme "Animals on the Road."  Other publications will include a set of artist pages for the special issue of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities on “Animality and Techne,” and an essay for the “Feral” section of the forthcoming Routledge Handbook of Human-Animal Studies.  His 1994 article "A poetics of graphic design?" is reprinted in the new anthology Graphic Design: History in the Writing, and an Italian translation of a chapter from his first book, Picturing the Beast, is also due to appear in the journal Liberazioni.

TALKS, WRITINGS AND ART PROJECTS, 2011:  Work from Baker’s photographic series “Norfolk Roadkill, Mainly” was reproduced and discussed in Giovanni Aloi’s book Art & Animals and (in dialogue with Susan McHugh) in the “Art and Animality” issue of the online journal Art & Research (vol. 4, no. 1): http://www.artandresearch.org.uk/v4n1/baker.php
He also contributed to the group exhibition “The Animal Gaze Returned” (Cass Gallery, London), and his site-specific project “Where Things Are” was included in the exhibition “Salthouse 11: Ad Limina,” curated by Laura Williams, in the medieval church of St Nicholas, Salthouse, Norfolk.  His publications that year included the essay “Immense Disorder” in Sanna Kannisto’s artist monograph Fieldwork (New York: Aperture); the essay “Contemporary Art and Animal Rights” in the edited collection Considering Animals: Contemporary Studies in Human-Animal Relations (London: Ashgate); and the foreword to the issue of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture on “Animal Wrongs and Rights.”  He delivered keynotes at the conferences “Representing Animals in Britain” (Rennes), “The Animal Gaze Returned” (London), and “Animals and Aesthetics” (Berlin), and was one of the four speakers at the conference “Unruly Creatures: The Art and Politics of the Animal” at the Natural History Museum in London.

Baker is an Advisory Board member of the recently announced Penn State UP book series “Animalibus: Of Animals and Cultures,” and is a member of the editorial boards of Society & Animals, Antennae, and the new AustralAsian Animal Studies Journal.  He is also a member of the Minding Animals Academic Advisory Council, and of the Scientific Committee for the Minding Animals II conference (Utrecht University, July 2012).  Having taken early retirement from his full-time UCLan post in 2008, he continues to supervise postgraduate students and has a particular interest in supporting practice-based research in the arts.  He has served as external examiner for postgraduate theses at Dartington College of Arts and the University of Western Australia, and as an external PhD supervisor at the University of Leeds, the London Consortium and the University of Newcastle.  He has also supported programme validation and review events at York St John University.  At UCLan, he is affiliated to the School of Education and Social Science, and is an associate of both the Centre for Contemporary Art and the Electronic and Digital Art Unit.  He completed PINNA “Manager as Coach” training in 2009, and continues to use his coaching experience to support the University’s research agenda.

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