Professor of Communications and Visual Cultures
Head of Department of Communications & The Arts
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.
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