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Overview

Biography

Suzannah Biernoff joined the History of Art Department at ÌÇÐÄlogoÈë¿Ú in 2007, having previously taught on the Visual Culture programme at Middlesex University, at Chelsea College of Art and Design, and at Sydney University. Her books, focusing on histories of the body, face and visuality, include (Palgrave, 2002) and (University of Michigan Press, 2017).

Suzannah’s research on the history of the face and disfigurement was funded by the Wellcome Trust through a Research Leave Award (2007-10) and a ÌÇÐÄlogoÈë¿Ú/Wellcome Trust ISSF mid-career award (2015). A Wellcome Trust Small Grant supported Visualising Illness: a programme of events that brought together stakeholders with an interest in visual first-person responses to illness, including clinicians, art therapists, artists, and art historians. Publications related to this project include ‘Picturing Pain’ in , edited by Deborah Padfield and Joanna Zakrzewska, and a chapter on ‘Beauty, ugliness and ideas of difference’ for the forthcoming Bloomsbury Cultural History of Beauty edited by Paul Deslandes.

Her current project, on cinema and the unbeautiful, investigates the ways in which film has created, perpetuated and challenged stereotypes of facial difference over the past century. ‘’ (Wellcome Open Research, 2018) is the first piece of writing in this series, on Georges Franju’s Les Yeux Sans Visage, followed by essays on David Lynch's The Elephant Man (in The Disfigured Face in American Literature, Film, and Television, edited by Klecker and Grabher, 2021) and Sacha Polak's Dirty God (, 2023).

She is co-director of ÌÇÐÄlogoÈë¿Ú's Centre for Medical and Health Humanities and teaches on the cross-disciplinary .

Highlights

•  on JSTOR

• for the Wellcome Open Research blog

• for the BBC's World War One at Home series.

• in the Warburg Institute podcasts series.

•  in Wellcome Collection’s Stories series.

•  event with Danny Rees, live streamed as part of Wellcome Collection's 'The Cult of Beauty' exhibition.

Office hours

By appointment

Web profiles

ORCID

Research

Research interests

• Medieval and modern histories of the body, face and senses
• Disability history (with a focus on the politics and aesthetics of representation since 1900)
• Visual cultures of health and illness

Research overview

Spanning the medieval and modern periods, Suzannah’s publications have focused on sensory experience and histories of the body and face. Her first book, , was published in Palgrave’s New Middle Ages series in 2002. With the support of a Wellcome Trust Research Leave Award from 2007-10 she extended these interests into the modern period, looking at visual anxiety and vulnerable embodiment in relation to facial injury and disfigurement. Her second monograph, was published in 2017 by The University of Michigan Press in their Corporealities: Discourses of Disability series. This project is distinctive in its attention to the face – which has tended to be overlooked in histories of the body – and in its use of visual sources as historical documents, from clinical photographs and life drawings to portrait masks and photo albums; sources that complicate and at times contradict the written record of war injury and repair.

Suzannah’s current research, on cinema and the unbeautiful, investigates the ways in which film has created, perpetuated and challenged stereotypes of facial difference over the past century. 

Research Centres and Institutes

• ,

Supervision and teaching

Supervision

Supervisions external to ÌÇÐÄlogoÈë¿Ú:

3

Supervisions within ÌÇÐÄlogoÈë¿Ú:

5

I welcome enquiries from prospective PhD students who are interested in undertaking research on the history of the body/face in the modern period, or visual cultures of disability, disfigurement and illness.

Current PhD students: 

• Katie Sambrook, '(De)composition: artistic encounters with death at the Paris Morgue'. Co-supervised with Dr Allison Deutsch.
• Elizabeth Fullerton, 'The polyphonic turn in collaborative art: voice, dialogue, critique'. Co-supervised with Dr Richard Hamblyn.
• Laura Cowley, 'Humour and polemic in the UK Disability Arts Movement'. Wellcome Trust funded.
• Annette Waywell, ‘Lustre: the history and cultural aesthetics of sheen in the fashion image’.
  
• Rebecca McKay, ’Dissecting a visual language of surgery in the work of Osman Berberović’.

Past PhD students include:

• Christine Slobogin, ‘Tracing Trauma in Dickie Orpen’s World War II Plastic Surgery Drawings’ (completed 2021).
• Anna Jamieson, ‘The Spaces and Spectacles of Female Madness in England, 1770-1830’, co-supervised with Professor Kate Retford (completed 2020).
• Jane Quinn, ‘Shared spaces? Contemporary war art since 1991’ (completed 2019).
• Jessica Borge, ‘The London Rubber Company, the Condom and the Pill: 1932-1965’, co-supervised with Dr Janet McCabe (completed 2017). Protective Practices: A History of the London Rubber Company and the Condom Business published by McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020.
• Nicola McCartney, ‘The Artistic Multitude’ (completed 2016). Death of the Artist: Artworld Dissident and their Alternative Identities published by I.B. Tauris, 2018.
• Fiona Johnstone, ‘Absent bodies: anti-portraiture and the time of AIDS’ (completed 2015). AIDS and Representation: Portraits and Self Portraits During the AIDS Crisis in America published by Bloomsbury, 2023.
• Jane Norris, ‘Viatopias’ (Central Saint Martins, completed 2010).
• Luke White, ‘Damien Hirst and the Legacy of the Sublime in Contemporary Art and Culture’ (Middlesex University, completed 2009).
• Andrea Büttner, ‘The Aesthetics of Shame in Contemporary Art’ (Royal College of Art, completed 2009).
• Cameron Cartiere, ‘Re/placing Public Art,’ (Chelsea College of Art & Design, completed 2004).

Current doctoral researchers

• KATIE SAMBROOK

  Nature of supervision:

  JOINT PRINCIPAL SUPERVISOR, Jan 2024

Doctoral alumni since 2013-14

• JESSICA BORGE

  Nature of supervision:

  Joint Principal Supervisor

  Title of thesis:

  Visual Narratives of Oral Contraception in 1960s Britain

  Awarded:

  2017

• CHRISTINE SLOBOGIN

  Nature of supervision:

  Principal Supervisor, Oct 2017

  Title of thesis:

  Dickie Orpen and the Visual Culture of World War II Plastic Surgery in Britain

  Awarded:

  2021

• ANNA JAMIESON

  Nature of supervision:

  Joint Principal Supervisor, Oct 2017

  Awarded:

  2021

• JANE QUINN

  Nature of supervision:

  Principal Supervisor

  Title of thesis:

  War Art and the Imagery of Conflict Since 1991

  Awarded:

  2019

Teaching

Focusing on modern and contemporary visual culture and histories of the body, medicine, and disability, I teach across all levels of the BA Art History and the History of Art/Photography/Museum Cultures Masters programmes.

I also contribute to medical humanities teaching at BA and MA level and offer a cross-disciplinary MA option, Exhibiting the Body. Please contact me if you would like to know when this course will be running.

Teaching modules

• Frameworks: Histories and Theories of Art, Architecture, Photography
• Historical Studies Postgraduate Research Training
• Museum Cultures - Approaches, Issues, Skills
• MA Dissertation
• Exhibiting the Body
• Narrative Medicine

Publications

Business and community

Outreach