Professor Geoff Batchen has retired from his post as Head of Department and Professor of Art History at Trinity College, Oxford, having reached the university's contractual retirement age. Batchen presented a farewell lecture: Going Postal. Photography and Exchange on 17 July.
Geoffrey Batchen was appointed to the Professorship of the History of Art at the University of Oxford on 19 May 2019 and he officially took up the post on 1 January 2020, at which time he also became a fellow of Trinity College. During his tenure he has supervised a new generation of PhD students bring new approaches and insights in photographic history, He curated the Bodleian exhibition A New Power. Photography in Britain 1800-1850 in 2023. He was actively involved in the appointment of the library's new post of Curator of Photography.
Going Postal investigated the history of 'mail art', focusing on the intersection of photographic images, hand-written correspondence, and the global postal system. It explored how photographs circulated through the mail—such as vintage postcards and private letters and transformed personal correspondence into a distinct medium of visual, artistic, and social exchange.
Batchen's biography from the History of Art department is below:
GEOFFREY BATCHEN (BA PhD Sydney) holds the Professorship of the History of Art in the Department of the History of Art and the Faculty of History. Professor Batchen is a Fellow of Trinity College.
Professor Batchen's work as a teacher, writer and curator focuses on the history of photography. His publications include Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (1997); Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History (2001); Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance (2004); William Henry Fox Talbot (2008); What of Shoes: Van Gogh and Art History (2009); Suspending Time: Life, Photography, Death (2010); Emanations: The Art of the Cameraless Photograph (2016); Apparitions: Photography and Dissemination (2018); and Negative/Positive: A History of Photography (2020). He has also edited Photography Degree Zero: Reflections on Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida (2009) and co-edited Picturing Atrocity: Photography in Crisis (2012). His curated exhibitions have been shown at, among other places, the Museu Nacional de Belas Artes in Rio de Janeiro; the New England Regional Art Museum in Amridale, Australia; the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam; the National Media Museum in Bradford, UK; the International Center of Photography in New York; the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum in Cologne; the Izu Photo Museum in Shizuoka, Japan; the National Museum of Iceland in Reykjavik; the Adam Art Gallery in Wellington, New Zealand; the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in New Plymouth, NZ; and the Centre for Contemporary Photography in Melbourne, Australia.
Professor Batchen is the Head of Department for 2025-2026.
