Associate Professor in Modern and Contemporary Art History at Trinity College Dublin

Research interests

I am a historian of contemporary art, design, and visual culture. My research has previously focussed on the ‘social turn’ in art and design from the 1960s on. This research was published as Play and Participation in Contemporary Arts Practices in 2015 and in the journals Art History, Art Journal, and Journal of Design History. In 2019, I edited a special issue of Sculpture Journal on toys and modern sculpture. Current research focuses on ecocritical art and design history, the visual culture of science, and the contribution of art/design history to the environmental humanities. Current book projects include the monograph Buckminster Fuller’s World Game and Its Legacy for Routledge (forthcoming 2021), which studies the design strategies, gameplay, and modelling techniques of the World Game and related projects from the late 1960s to the present. I am co-editor of Nervous Systems: Art, Systems, and Politics since the 1960s for Duke University Press (forthcoming 2021), a collection of essays that expand the study of systems art to address race, gender, embodiment, and the politics of global networks and infrastructures. I am Chair (2020-23) of the Environmental Humanities Working Group for the Irish Humanities Alliance at the Royal Irish Academy.I am also a member of the Trinity Centre for Environmental Humanities.

Selected Research Publication

• Nervous Systems: Art, Systems, and Politics since the 1960s, co-edited with Johanna Gosse, Duke University Press, in press.
• ‘Ecocritical Art History’, Art History 43, no. 3, May 2020, pp. 640-645.
• ‘Systems in Play: Simon Nicholson’s Design 12 Course, University of California, Berkeley, 1966’, Journal of Design History 32, no. 3, September 2019, pp. 223–239.
• ‘Operable Abstraction: How Toys Changed the Logic of Modern Sculpture’, Sculpture Journal 28, no. 2, 2019, pp. 161-173.
• ‘Ludic Pedagogies at the College of Environmental Design, UC Berkeley, 1966 to 1972’, in Kjetil Fallan, ed. The Culture of Nature in the History of Design, Abingdon: Routledge, 2019.
• ‘When Attitudes Became Toys: Jasia Reichardt’s Play Orbit’, Art History 41, no.2, April 2018, pp. 344-369.
• ‘How Things Grow: Gabriel Orozco’s Samurai Tree: Invariants (2005)’, Art Journal 76, nos. 3-4, Fall 2017, pp. 32-47.

Teaching

My teaching covers modern and contemporary art. I teach modules on global postmodern and contemporary art and on art, design, and nature since the 1930s. Past and present PhD researchers have studied a history of Irish and British adventure playgrounds, Irish interior design for autism, Irish data centre architecture, cybernetic art in post-war Argentina, participatory arts institutions, commemorative exhibitions, and queer Irish art. I welcome proposals for a research degree from suitably qualified applicants.

Dr. Stott on the TCD Research Support System

Contact Details

Department of History of Art and Architecture
School of Histories and Humanities
F.08, Provost’s Stables
Trinity College Dublin, the University of Dublin
Dublin 2
Email: stottt@tcd.ie