Professor Steve Edwards has been appointed Manton Professor of British Art. Beginning in April, he will serve as the inaugural Director of The Courtauld’s new Manton Centre for British Art, the new home for The Courtauld’s research and teaching on British art. Edwards is currently Professor of the History and Theory of Photography at Birkbeck, and before that had been at the Open University.
Named after British art collectors and philanthropists Sir Edwin Manton and Florence, Lady Manton, The Manton Centre for British Art will serve as an intellectual hub for art historians, curators, artists, and students nationally and internationally, providing a platform for sharing world-leading research and teaching the next generation of British art specialists. It will be located initially at The Courtauld’s current campus at Vernon Square and will later be housed in purpose-designed premises at Somerset House.
The Manton Centre was established by the Corutauld in 2024 with a $12 million donation. The Centre, named after British art collectors and philanthropists, Sir Edwin Manton and Florence, Lady Manton, will help secure The Courtauld’s ambition of becoming a world leader in the field of British art, and marks the continued commitment of the Manton family to arts education. The Manton Centre for British Art will serve as an intellectual hub for art historians, curators, critics, artists and students nationally and internationally, providing a platform for sharing world-leading research and for teaching the next generation of British art specialists.
Located initially at The Courtauld’s current campus at Vernon Square, King's Cross, the Manton Centre will later be housed in the purpose-designed premises at Somerset House, providing the physical and intellectual home for The Courtauld’s research and teaching on British art. The Courtauld’s specialists in British art will become members of the Centre and help shape its activities and development. The Centre will operate as the base for students taking modules in British art as part of their MA degree and also provide a home for The Courtauld’s PhD students researching British art.
The Centre will present an ambitious and dynamic programme of events including:
- An annual lecture in memory of Sir Edwin and Lady Manton
- An annual international conference devoted to a major topic in the field
- Regular workshops devoted to specific areas of British art
- An annual programme of seminars and lectures enabling scholars, curators, critics and artists to share their thinking and research
- An annual ‘scholar in residence’ programme, designed to host a leading figure in the field of British art.
The Manton Centre for British Art will also pursue collaborations with other scholarly and artistic institutions both in the UK and around the world. In pursing these collaborations and partnerships, the Centre will engage with all areas and periods of British art, and with a wide range of partners and interlocutors.
See: https://courtauld.ac.uk/news-blogs/2025/executive-dean-and-deputy-director-and-manton-professor-for-british-art-announcement/ and https://courtauld.ac.uk/news-blogs/2024/the-manton-centre-for-british-art-announcement/
https://www.bbk.ac.uk/our-staff/#overview
Edwards' Birkbeck biography notes: Steve grew up on a council estate and he was a manual worker before going to art school with the intention of becoming a great artist, instead he found politics and theory. He studied the MA in Social History of Art at the University of Leeds with John Tagg and Griselda Pollock, receiving a Distinction, and then did PhD research at Portsmouth Polytechnic and the University of Leeds with Adrian Rifkin (and for a short while with the late Robbie Grey). Between 1991 and 1997 he was Head of Historical & Theoretical Studies in Photography at the University of Derby. In 1997 he was a visiting scholar at the Victoria & Albert Museum; the same year he moved to the Open University, where he contributed teaching material on nineteenth- and twentieth-century art to a variety of courses and edited three Open University textbooks. In 2006 he was a Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan. Steve was made Professor at the OU in 2013 and, between 2012 and 2016, he was the Head of the Department of Art History. He joined the Department of Art History at Birkbeck in 2016 as Professor of History & Theory of Photography.
Administrative responsibilities: Research Director and REF lead; Co-Director History and Theory of Photography Research Centre
Visiting posts: Visiting Professor, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 01-2016 to 03-2006; Visiting Professor, Université Bordeaux-Montagne, 10-2018 to 12-2018
Professional activities: Senior Teaching Fellow HEA; Editorial Board: Oxford Art Journal; Editorial Collective Historical Materialism Book Series (Brill/Haymarket); Co-convenor Research Seminar Series 'Marxism in Culture', Institute of Advanced Studies, Senate House
Professional membership: Senior Teaching Fellow HEA; AHRC Peer Review College
He has published extensively on photography and is currently working on the book looking at the early business of photography.
Image: © Michael Pritchard. Steve Edwards delivering a paper at A New Power symposium, Bodleian Libraries in March 2023.
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