Routledge Focus on Art History and Visual Studies
About the Book Series
Routledge Focus on Art History and Visual Studies presents short-form books on varied topics within the fields of art history and visual studies.
Art, Movement, and Disability: Transcending the Beauty Paradigm
1st Edition
By Timothy W. Hiles
January 21, 2026
This book explores how artists with disabilities have provided social, emotional, psychological, and physical context for understanding the complexities surrounding disability. Breaking new ground, this book uses an interdisciplinary-thematic approach to understanding disability through the eyes of...
Art Encounters in the Nuclear Age: Radiant Objects
1st Edition
Edited
By Jessica Holtaway
November 17, 2025
Written by artists, curators, historians, and cultural workers, Art Encounters in the Nuclear Age: Radiant Objects is a collection of essays that offers an idiosyncratic cross-section of nuclear history, foregrounding stories of objects and artworks. This collection aims to expand discourse around ...
Concerning The Quantum in Art
1st Edition
By Paul Thomas
October 28, 2025
This book offers an artist’s perspective on the intriguing relationship between quantum physics and fine art, focusing particularly on the role of probability, chance and uncertainty. The author, rather than approaching quantum mechanics as a scientist, explores how its concepts shape perception ...
Maya Lin, Public Art, and the Confluence Project
1st Edition
By Matthew Reynolds
September 28, 2025
The first scholarly monograph devoted exclusively to this vital work of contemporary public art, this book examines Maya Lin’s Confluence Project through the lens of environmental humanities and Indigenous studies. Matthew Reynolds provides a detailed analysis of each earthwork, along with a ...
Translation and Transgression in the Art of Shirin Neshat
1st Edition
By Erin C. Devine
May 05, 2025
Precisely 30 years after the debut of her provocative photo-portraits, this book chronicles the early career of Iranian-American artist Shirin Neshat. In its first 20 years, Neshat’s work weaved viewers into complex readings of women and power in Iran. Yet her images also drew criticisms of ...
A Philosophy of Cultural Scenes in Art and Popular Culture
1st Edition
By Max Ryynänen, Jozef Kovalčik
April 13, 2025
This book seeks to understand culture through the lens of scenes, analyzing them aesthetically and culturally as well as understanding them through the frameworks of gender, social networks, and artworlds. It is common to talk about the cultural and intellectual scenes of early twentieth-century ...
Contemporary Art, Systems and the Aesthetics of Dispersion
1st Edition
By Francis Halsall
December 19, 2024
Using five case studies of contemporary art, this book uses ideas of systems and dispersion to understand identity and experience in late capitalism. This book considers five artists who exemplify contemporary art practice: Seth Price; Liam Gillick; Martin Creed; Hito Steyerl; and Theaster Gates....
Bodily Engagements with Film, Images, and Technology: Somavision
1st Edition
By Max Ryynänen
October 09, 2024
This book builds a new understanding of the body and its relationship to images and technology, using a framework where novel writings of pragmatist somaesthetics and phenomenology meet new research on bodily reactions. Max Ryynänen gives an overview of the topic by collecting the existing ...
Buckminster Fuller’s World Game and Its Legacy
1st Edition
By Tim Stott
October 09, 2024
This book studies R. Buckminster Fuller’s World Game and similar world games, past and present. Proposed by Fuller in 1964 and first played in colleges and universities across North America at a time of growing ecological crisis, the World Game attempted to turn data analysis, systems modelling, ...
Jimmie Durham, Europe, and the Art of Relations
1st Edition
By Andrea Feeser
October 09, 2024
This book investigates Jimmie Durham’s community-building process of making and display in four of his projects in Europe: Something … Perhaps a Fugue or an Elegy (2005); two Neapolitan nativities (2016 and ongoing); The Middle Earth (with Maria Thereza Alves, 2018); and God’s Poems, God’s Children...
Post-Digital Letterpress Printing: Research, Education and Practice
1st Edition
Edited
By Pedro Amado, Ana Catarina Silva, Vítor Quelhas
October 08, 2024
This book presents an overview of the convergence of traditional letterpress with contemporary digital design and fabrication practices. Reflecting on the role of letterpress within the emergent hybrid post-digital design process, contributors present historical and contemporary analysis, grounded...
World-Forming and Contemporary Art
1st Edition
By Jessica Holtaway
October 08, 2024
This book explores how contemporary art can alter the ways in which we visualise and conceptualise the world and the social relations that shape it. Drawing from the writings of philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, it spotlights the concept of ‘world-forming’ and the political significance of art-making and...