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Areas of expertise: modern and contemporary art history; feminist theory; dada and surrealism; transformational learning
Email: victoria.carruthers@acu.edu.au
Location: ACU Strathfield Campus
ORCID ID: 0000-0002-8227-355X
Dr Victoria Carruthers is Associate Professor of Art History and Theory in the National School of Arts. She has extensive experience in teaching across all aspects of art history from Renaissance to contemporary visual cultures in Europe, America and Australia. Victoria has a varied educational background across the social sciences, music, philosophy and literature and incorporates this experience into interdisciplinary research focused on the intersections between materiality, politics, literature, music, philosophy and feminist practices in modern and contemporary cultures. Victoria completed her PhD at University of Essex (UK) on the American artist Dorothea Tanning, whom she knew and worked with until the artist's death in 2012. She has published on Tanning's work and its relationship to surrealism, music, gothic literature and the subjectivities of maternity. She also writes broadly on contemporary Australian art. Victoria published the first critical monograph on Dorothea Tanning entitled Transformations in the UK and New York in 2020. Victoria is internationally recognised as a specialist in women surrealist artists.
Victoria has been developing innovative, research-led curriculum for teaching across the visual arts at ACU since 2014, both in Australia and abroad at the Venice Biennale, Italy (contemporary art), in Paris, France (modern art) and at the ACU Rome Study Centre (renaissance and baroque art and architecture). She is currently interested in research projects looking at transformational learning styles and the way creativity in the arts fosters empathy, connectedness and meaning-making in contemporary life.
Whilst at ACU, Victoria has successfully supervised, and continues to supervise, a number of Honours and Phd students in both Creative Practice and traditional Dissertation formats. A selection of ACU PhD projects:
A Narrative of the Imagined Future: how art-making displaced a narrative of suicidality (completed 2020)
Spectres in the studio: time, memory and the artist's haunted imagination (completed 2021)
Countering a colonial collection: new perspectives on Australia's Foundational Stories through the work of women artists in the Art Gallery of Ballarat (current)
The Magic of the Mother: reclaiming matrescence through magical feminist writing (current)
Books
Book chapters
Journal articles