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Ben Pollitt is an Associate Lecturer in History of Art. He received his PhD from UCL in 2020. He was a Paul Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellow and a Caird Research Fellow. He taught at the Courtauld Institute of Art from 2020–24. Ben returned to join the History of Art department at UCL in 2024. His research centres on British art, empire and the affective economies of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Pacific exploration. Recent publications include articles on early European representations of Māori and Indigenous Australians in RES and Oxford Art Journal. He is currently working on a book about views of the Pacific in European print culture (c. 1600–1800).
Research
My research focuses on the visual record of early European encounters with the Pacific. I consider how prints, in different ways, were used to bring home to the European viewer the people and places of the Pacific (c. 1600–1800). My published articles often discuss how European contact with the cultures of the Pacific lent shape to sympathy as a social and visual construct in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. More recently, I have looked at European representations of Australian natural history (c. 1700–1800). I am particularly interested in framing this research in relation to the persistence of the topoi of the four classical elements.
Specialisms
Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British art, maritime exploration and print culture.
Selected Publications
- ‘Coals for the Study: Reading Fire in William Westall’s Views of Australia,’ Oxford Art Journal (Forthcoming: December 2024)
- ‘The Sympathetic Cannibal: an Antipodean Satire,’ RES 81–82 (Spring-Autumn 2024): 163-183
- ‘The Blue Beyond: Naiza Khan’s Manora and The Left-to-Die-Boat,’ Third Text, ‘Decolonising Colour’ (February 2021)
- ‘Sympathy, Magnetism and Immoderate Laughter: the Feather in Cook’s Last Voyage,’ Art Bulletin 101, no 4 (Dec 2019): 70–94
- ‘The Cost of Sympathy: Towards a Visual Economics of John Webber’s Atlas,’ Object: Graduate Research and Reviews in the History of Art and Visual Culture 19 (2017): 55–76
Teaching and Supervision
In the academic year 2024/25 Ben is teaching the modules:
- HART0205: Colonial/Modern: Indigenous Art Past and Present
- HART0032: Methodologies of Art History
- HART0006: First-Year History of Art Survey (2): c. 1600 to the Contemporary
- HART0004: History of Art Thematic Seminar: Decolonial London
