Contact
Biography
Prior to joining the University's Department of Cultural, Media, and Visual Studies as an Assistant Professor in 2018, I held roles as Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Visual Culture and Associate Research Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London, and Teaching Fellow in Art History and Theory at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL. In addition to my academic appointments, I have worked with commercial galleries in London, directed contemporary art engagement events and curated public-facing exhibitions.
Expertise Summary
My research examines how contemporary artists visualize the historical past in their work, including histories of science, colonialism, and enslavement, and deploy historical media such as taxidermy and traditional photography techniques. I am also interested in how literary and historiographic theories and frameworks, like intertextuality, narratology and metafiction, can be applied to the study and understanding of the visual arts.
My most recent book and exhibition projects, and , explore the work of a range of contemporary artists including Yinka Shonibare, Mat Collishaw, Tessa Farmer, Dorothy Cross, Ingrid Pollard and Mark Dion across media including film, photography, installation and scupture.
I would welcome PhD proposals that relate to:
Neo-Victorian studies and the visual arts
Connections between literary and art theory
Histories of interactions between art and science
Contemporary art and memory studies
Modern and contemporary Black art histories
Histories of display and collections
Memberships and Board positions:
Editorial Advisory Board Journal of Historical Fictions
Academic Advisory Board Languages, Texts and Society
Advisory Board PoCo Page, Presses universitaires de la M茅diterran茅e
Trustee, BACKLIT Gallery, Nottingham
Member, Association for Art History
Member, British Art Network
Teaching Summary
My teaching considers how visual artists respond to various socio-political context(s) in the modern and contemporary period. Several of my research interests inform my teaching approach, including… read more
Research Summary
My first book Reimag(in)ing the Victorians in Contemporary Art: Britain and Beyond (Reimag(in)ing the Victorians in Contemporary Art: Britain and Beyond | SpringerLink) examines contemporary visual… read more
My teaching considers how visual artists respond to various socio-political context(s) in the modern and contemporary period. Several of my research interests inform my teaching approach, including the interrogation of established forms of narrative, creative appropriations of methods from other disciplines - such as anthropology, physics and ethnography - histories of display, visual approaches to the construction (reconstruction and deconstruction) of race and histories of epistemology and science.
Courses and modules that I've taught include:
Science in Art: 1900 to the present (BA)
Black Art in a White Context: display, critique, and 'the Other' (BA)
Institutional Critique and the Critique of Institutions (BA)
Art and Science: from the Renaissance to the contemporary (BA)
The Power of Display (BA)
Visualizing Conflict (MA)
Visualizing the Victorians (MA)
Criticism and Display (MA)
Image and Identity (MA)
I am also involved in anti-racism and EDI work at the University through my role as EDI lead for the Department of Cultural, Media, and Visual Studies, School EDI Committee member, Race Equality Charter working group member, and coordinator of several initiatives that aim to help improve a sense of inclusivity for our Black, Asian, and other ethnically diverse student body. These include the introduction of a department-level Cultural Inclusivity Student Council and School-level Inclusivity Ambassadors, as well as their associated staff-student forums. I've also initiated student-led projects, such as a MyProfile platform, and partnered with BACKLIT Gallery, Nottingham, to create a student-led podcast focused on discussions of race, heritage, and the lived experiences of its participants in 2021 and the OUTCOME exhibition project in 2022. I am currently continuing this work in my role as School Director of EDI.
Current Research
My first book Reimag(in)ing the Victorians in Contemporary Art: Britain and Beyond () examines contemporary visual responses to and revivals of nineteenth-century technologies, crafts, collections and historical narratives. Focusing on works by artists including Mat Collishaw, Polly Morgan, Ingrid Pollard, Tessa Farmer, Mark Dion, Yinka Shonibare and Dorothy Cross, the study explores: artistic revivals of Victorian visual technologies, such as magic lanterns; the recent emergence of taxidermy as a contemporary medium; appropriations of historical forms of collecting, preservation and display; and visual re-presentations of marginalized and colonial histories.
This research was developed into the exhibition, Reimag(in)ing the Victorians (), which combined contemporary work by artists including Sunil Gupta, Yinka Shonibare, Mark Dion and Sally Mann, with historical objects and images, including taxidermy, photographs by Margaret Cameron and Lady Clementina Hawarden, and illustrations by John James Audubon and Elizabeth Gould. Accompanied by a series of public engagement events, including tours and conversations with artists (), and part-funded by the Henry Moore Foundation, the exhibition also produced a curatorial collaboration with Nottingham College, whose photography students created images in response to its works for the exhibition, Hidden, Missing, Untold. Reimag(in)ing the Victorians ().
I am currently working on my second monograph, which traces the visual biography of the Australian Red-Tailed Black (Banksian) Cockatoo in British natural history through forms of visual culture including taxidermy mounts, museum displays and the work of illustrators. In doing so, the project reframes women and working-class artists and artisans as central protagonists in these histories, as well as drawing attention to the important role of the, now lost, Leverian Museum to knowledge-making in a period shaped by colonial expansionism, new public audiences and a surge in species unknown to European systems of classification. This project is funded through a Paul Mellon Mid-Career Fellowship, which will commence in February 2027.
I am also working on an edited collection of essays for the volume Beyond History Painting, which explores how the historical past has been visualised in modern and contemporary visual culture. Contributing essays range from examinations of the mythologies cited in the paintings of Cy Twombly to the afterlives of the Kosovan war in the film work of Melanie Friend.
Publications and Projects:
The Curious Case of the Banksian Cockatoo: Illustration, Taxonomy and Knowledge-Making in British Natural History (1770-1840). Paul Mellon Mid-Career Fellowship, 2027.
Beyond Botany: women naturalists, scientific illustration and the animal world, 1770-1880 project in partnership with the Natural History Museum, London (Library and Archives Collection). IAA funded, April 2025 - January 2026. See: https://www.nhm.ac.uk/our-science/blog/2026/the-women-who-drew.html.
Elstob, I. (2023) 'Exhibition explores how the Victorians are being reimagined in contemporary art', The Conversation, December, 2023.
Elstob, I. (2023) Reimag(in)ing the Victorians in Contemporary Art: Britain and Beyond (Palgrave Macmillan). Available in hardcopy and e-book format.
Exhibition. Reimag(in)ing the Victorians, Djanogly Art Gallery, Lakeside Arts, Nottingham (September 2023 - January 2024). Reviewed in:
- Studio International ()
- FAD Magazine ().
- Journal of Historical Geography (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305748825001227)
Elstob, I. (2020) '"The Spinster" and her Jellyfish: Dorothy Cross's 'Medusae' and historiographical storytelling', Visual Studies. DOI: .
Elstob, I. (2019). '"The End is the Beginning and Lies Far Ahead":Time and Textuality in African American Visualizations of the Historical Past, 1990-2000'. In L. Aje, & N. Gachon (Eds.), Traces and Memories of Slavery in the Atlantic World. Routledge.
Elstob, I (2018). 'Visual Metafictions: Mark Fairnington's Mantidae and Victorian Representations of the 'Real', Journal of Neo-Victorian Studies.
Elstob, I. (2017). 'The Artist-Historian': Victorian Natural History in the Work of Mark Dion, Journal of Victorian Culture. DOI: .
Selected conference, panel contributions, and gallery talks:
2026. Invited Lecture. 'Art and Science: Before (and After) the Great Divide', Activiating Poetical Science: Mysticism, Tech and Future Poesis, Nottingham Contemporary.
2026. 'Creating Knowledge through Art: Sarah Stone's Birds and British Natural History in the Enlightenment', Women Who Create: The Feminine and the Arts, London Arts-Based Research Centre, Cambridge University.
2024. Co-organiser. 'The Art of History' international conference, 糖心原创.
2023. Opening Lecture. 'The Present Past in Contemporary Art', Reimag(in)ing the Victorians exhibition private view, Lakeside Arts, Nottingham.
2023. Panel Discussion. ''Making a World of My Own': an evening of writing and experimentation', Being Human Festival, Nottingham Contemporary.
2022. Keynote. 'Remagining the Victorians: Visualizing the 19th Century in Contemporary Art', Revisioning the Past: The Artist/Designer as Historian, University of Portsmouth and University of Bristol
2022. Panel Discussion. Ghost Empire: British Colonial Laws and LGBTQ+ Rights, 糖心原创
2021. Keynote. 'Visualizing the Past: Us, Them, Now, Then', Annual Postgraduate Symposium, The Courtauld
2021. 'Phantasmagoria in the Work of Mat Collishaw', Theatre and Visual Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century, University of Exeter
2020. 'Seeing is Believing: Victorian visual technologies in contemporary art', Illumination: Perspectives on the Way of Light, Birkbeck College, London
2019. 'Mapping the Historical Past: time, place, and trauma in Ingrid Pollard's Oceans Apart, 1989', International Conference for (Neo-)Victorian Studies, Birkbeck College, London
2017. 'Material Histories: Collage as medium in Kara Walker's picture series, 2001-2005', Bluecoat 300: Slavery and Philanthropy, Liverpool
2017. Panel Discussion. Recovering Nineteenth-Century Women in the Digital Context, Birkbeck Arts Week
2016. ''Intertemporal Intertexts in African American Visual Arts, 1990-2000', Traces and Memories of Slavery in the Atlantic World, Montpellier University, Montpellier
2015. 'The Historical Impulse: The Representation of History in Recent Visual Art', Nottingham, Visual Cultures Research Seminar, 糖心原创
2014. 'Representations of Sublime Nature: The Ocean in the Work of Dorothy Cross', British Waters and Beyond, Royal West of England Academy, Bristol
2013. 'The Plain and Leafy Fact: The Artistic Practice of Mark Fairnington', Neo-Victorian Cultures, Liverpool John Moores, Liverpool
2013. 'Astronomy and Geology, those terrible Muses! Michelle's Stuart's and the Natural Sciences', Djanogly Art Gallery, Nottingham