School of Music Visiting Artist
Steven Harris is Associate Professor in the History of Art, Design and Visual Culture at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. He grew up in Vancouver, and taught at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and at Mount Allison University, before coming to the University of Alberta in 2001. He works on twentieth-century art in Europe and North America, and is the author of articles on surrealism, postwar abstraction and Fluxus. His book, Surrealist Art and Thought in the 1930s: Art, Politics and the Psyche, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2004. His current research project, The Poetics of Disenchantment, investigates both the surrealist movement in the postwar period, and how surrealist ideas and values were taken up or challenged by postwar European collectives like Cobra, The College of 'Pataphysics, and the Situationist International. He co-edited a recent issue of Art History with Natalie Adamson, and is one of the co-editors of a forthcoming International Encyclopedia of Surrealism.