Art and Literature
The Department is currently ranked joint first in the world for Philosophy of Art in The Philosophical Gourmet Report. The team at York has a greater concentration of specialists than almost any other English-speaking department, and their work covers literature and poetry, vision and the visual arts, creativity, the arts of pre-history, art and the emotions, the nature of art and empirical approaches to aesthetics.
We organise regular workshops and other activities, and participate in the White Rose Aesthetics Forum.
A number of our staff contribute to this research, and are interested in supervising PhD work in this area. Click the links to learn more about their work:
- Greg Currie: art and cognitive science, the imagination, understanding stories and pictures, learning from fiction.
- David Efird: theological aesthetics.
- Owen Hulatt: analytic and 'continental' approaches. Adorno, form-content unity, musical and literary profundity, artistic autonomy.
- Peter Lamarque: philosophy of literature; especially interpretation, literature and truth, art ontology, poetry, narrative and the self.
- Paul Noordhof: the perception of expressive properties, imagination in the experience of art.
- Catherine Wilson: visuality, fiction and emotion, biological approaches to understanding beauty.
- Jenefer Robinson, author of Deeper than Reason: Emotion and its Role in Literature, Music, and Art and President of the American Society for Aesthetics 2009-2011 is an Honorary Visiting Professor in the Department and will visit us annually for workshops and graduate master classes.