Dr Nicola Mann

Nicola Mann - Head of Dept of Communication and Media and Professor of Comms and Visual Culture

Professor of Communications and Visual Cultures
Head of Department of Communications

Contact:
Email: nicola.mann@richmond.ac.uk
School: School of Communications, Arts & Social Sciences
Research centre: International Visual Arts and Cultures

About

Nicola joined the School of Communications, Arts, and Social Sciences in September 2012. Informed by urban culture studies and community activism, her current research considers dominant visualisations of London’s Heygate council estate in light of recent regeneration efforts. Through analysis of television shows including Top Boy (Channel 4), Nicola addresses the ways in which the estate is mythologized in popular visual culture as a racially- and politically-charged site that deserves to be demolished. She is currently working on a proposal to publish this research in the same monograph as her PhD thesis, which focuses on popular representations of Chicago’s Cabrini Green public housing neighborhood. The book will draw parallels in the visual treatments of both sites in order to problematize the intersection between race- and class-based codes and cultural discourses.

Until recently Nicola worked as a freelance Coordinator for the Arts Council of England-funded organization, The Happy Museum Project (HMP). She continues to liaise with the HMP and recently co-organized a popular conference with Dr. Annita Ventouris, titled: ‘Increasing Happiness and Wellbeing through Arts Participation & Play.’ Over the last two years, Nicola has worked on a series of collaborations related to her interest in social arts practice with Charlotte Bonham-Carter (Course Leader, MA Arts and Cultural Enterprise, Central Saint Martins). These include panel sessions at the 2014 Association of Art Historians conference and the 2016 College Art Association conference in Washington DC. They will publish a volume based on the AAH session with Palgrave Macmillan in 2016, titled ‘Rhetoric, Social Value and the Arts: But How Does it Work?’

The University of Rochester, New York, awarded Nicola her PhD in Visual and Cultural Studies in 2011. She also has an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art.

Research interests

Visual Culture
Popular Culture
Urban Regeneration
Cultural Studies
The Social Value of the Arts
Museum Education.

Teaching & learning

Taught programmes:

MA Art History and Visual Culture
MA Visual Arts Management and Curating
BA Art History and Visual Culture
BA American Studies

Taught Modules

AVC 7100 – Research Methods
AVC 7105 – Visual Cultures
VAM 7100 – Research Methods
VAM 7105 – Arts Education
AVC 4205 – Introduction to Visual Culture
AVC 5400 – British Art & Architecture
AMS 5400 – American Television Drama
AVC 6296 – Snr Seminar 1 in Art History and Visual Culture

Research outputs

Publications

Rhetoric, Social Value and the Arts: But How Does it Work?, co-editor with Charlotte Bonham-Carter, (Palgrave Macmillan Pivot, Summer 2016)
The Cultural Visualization of Hurricane Katrina, Invisible Culture, ed. Nicola Mann and Victoria Pass, Issue 15, (March 2011)

Book Chapters:

“From SuperOther to SuperMother: The Journey towards Liberty” in Engaging the Woman Fantastic in Contemporary American Media Culture, ed. Elyce Rae Helford, (University of Mississippi Press, 2016).
“Performing Cultural Authenticity in CBS’s Good Times”, in The Paradox of Authenticity in a Globalized World, ed. Dr. Russell Cobb, (Palgrave Macmillan, U.K.: 2014).
“Don’t Believe the Hype: The Death and Resurrection of Chicago’s ‘Hood in the American Visual Imagination, Habitus of the ‘Hood, ed. Dr. Hans Skott-Myhre and Chris Richardson, (Bristol, U.K.: Intellect Press, 2012: 271-298).

Articles:

“A Disconnected Community? (Re)visioning the Heygate Council Estate through Digital Activism”, Between Texts and Cities, Writing Visual Culture, eds. Daniel Marques Sampaio & Michael Heilgemeir, (May 2015)
“Criminalizing the ‘Hood”, Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism, (38.6, May/June 2011: 19-26).
“From Pathways to Portals: Getting to the Root of a Public Housing Community”, in Communicative Lands, Community Landscapes, Brock Review, Vol. 11, No. 2, (May 2011)
“From Pathways to Portals: Getting to the Root of a Public Housing Community”, in Community Building and Social Networks, Proteus: A Journal of Ideas, (April 2011)
“Criminalizing the ‘Hood: The Death of Public Housing in the American Visual Imagination”, Cross-Cultural Poetics: Streetnotes, ed. Blagovesta Momchedjikova, (Spring 2010)

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