Timothy Stott

Associate Professor in Modern and Contemporary Art History, Department of Art History & Architecture, Trinity College Dublin
I am a historian of contemporary art, design, and visual culture. My teaching covers modern and contemporary art, visual culture, and design. I teach modules on global postmodern and contemporary art and on art, design, and nature since the 1930s. Past and present PhD researchers have studied a history of Irish and British adventure playgrounds, Irish interior design for autism, Irish data centre architecture, cybernetic art in post-war Argentina, participatory arts institutions, commemorative exhibitions, queer Irish art, and the visual culture of climate science. I welcome proposals for a research degree from suitably qualified applicants.

My research has previously focussed on the ‘social turn’ in art and design from the 1960s on, published as Play and Participation in Contemporary Arts Practices in 2015 and in the journals Art History, Art Journal, and Journal of Design History. In 2019, I edited a special issue of Sculpture Journal on toys and modern sculpture. Current research focuses on ecocritical art and design history, the visual culture of science, and the contribution of art/design history to the environmental humanities. Buckminster Fuller’s World Game and Its Legacy (2021) studies the design strategies, gameplay, and modelling techniques of the World Game and related projects from the late 1960s to the present. Nervous Systems: Art, Systems, and Politics since the 1960s (2022), co-edited with Johanna Gosse, is a collection of essays that expand the study of systems art to address race, gender, embodiment, and the politics of global networks and infrastructures. I am Chair (2020-23) of the Environmental Humanities Working Group for the Irish Humanities Alliance at the Royal Irish Academy. I am also a member of the Trinity Centre for Environmental Humanities.

Selected publications
Nervous Systems: Art, Systems, and Politics since the 1960s, co-edited with Johanna Gosse, Duke University Press, 2022.

Buckminster Fuller's World Game and Its Legacy, Routledge, 2021.

‘Ecocritical Art History’, Art History 43, no. 3, May 2020, pp. 640-645.

‘Systems in Play: Simon Nicholson’s Design 12 Course, University of California, Berkeley, 1966’, Journal of Design History 32, no. 3, September 2019, pp. 223–239.

‘Operable Abstraction: How Toys Changed the Logic of Modern Sculpture’, Sculpture Journal 28, no. 2, 2019, pp. 161-173.

‘Something from Nothing: Tino Sehgal’s Systemic Objects’, Thresholds, 47, 2019.

‘Ludic Pedagogies at the College of Environmental Design, UC Berkeley, 1966 to 1972’, in Kjetil Fallan, ed. The Culture of Nature in the History of Design, Abingdon: Routledge, 2019.

‘When Attitudes Became Toys: Jasia Reichardt’s Play Orbit’, Art History 41, no.2, April 2018, pp. 344-369.

‘How Things Grow: Gabriel Orozco’s Samurai Tree: Invariants (2005)’, Art Journal 76, nos. 3-4, Fall 2017, pp. 32-47.