Professor Richard Taws

Richard Taws specialises in European visual cultures of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He completed his PhD at UCL in 2005, and taught previously at McGill University, Canada. He has been a Getty Postdoctoral Fellow, a Member of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and a Visiting Fellow at the Bard Graduate Center, New York. In 2012 he was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize, in 2018 a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship, and in 2022 a Leverhulme Research Fellowship. 

Richard’s research focuses on everyday, ephemeral, or obsolete forms of visual and material culture; the social and political stakes of printed images; and histories and theories of science, media, and technology from the eighteenth century to the present. He has written on varied topics in relation to the French Revolution and its aftermath. Much of his work examines the relation between images and concepts of historical time, and the entanglement of artistic and non-art objects, particularly in the fifty years either side of 1800.

Richard is the author of the books Time Machines: Telegraphic Images in Nineteenth-Century France (MIT Press, 2025) and The Politics of the Provisional: Art and Ephemera in Revolutionary France (Penn State University Press, 2013). He is co-editor of Time, Media, and Visuality in Post-Revolutionary France (with Iris Moon; Bloomsbury, 2021) and Art and Technology in Early Modern Europe (with Genevieve Warwick; Wiley-Blackwell, 2016), and as a member of the ‘Multigraph Collective’, he co-authored Interacting with Print: Elements of Reading in the Era of Print Saturation (University of Chicago Press, 2018). He is an editor of Oxford Art Journal.

Research

Richard’s most recent book, Time Machines: Telegraphic Images in Nineteenth-Century France (MIT Press, 2025), traces intersections between the period’s eclectic visual culture, changing ideas of time, and new communication technologies—notably the optical telegraph system. A related article, on various graphic devices developed in Egypt by Nicolas-Jacques Conté, was awarded the 2018 James L. Clifford Prize of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies

His first book, The Politics of the Provisional: Art and Ephemera in Revolutionary France (Penn State University Press, 2013), looked at images and objects made in France in the 1790s that represented conditions of transience, fragility, and incompletion. The Politics of the Provisional was shortlisted for the R. Gapper Prize of the Society for French Studies. An article derived from this book, on paper money and post-revolutionary memory, won the 2011 Max Nänny Prize, awarded by the International Association of Word and Image Studies, and has been included by Oxford Art Journal in a 40th anniversary collection of twelve key articles in the journal’s history. 

Richard is editor, with Iris Moon, of Time, Media, and Visuality in Post-Revolutionary France (Bloomsbury, 2021), and with Genevieve Warwick, of Art and Technology in Early Modern Europe (Wiley-Blackwell, 2016). As a member of the ‘Multigraph Collective’, an interdisciplinary group of media scholars, he co-authored Interacting with Print: Elements of Reading in the Era of Print Saturation (University of Chicago Press, 2018). Richard’s research has been published in journals including Grey Room, The Art Bulletin, Art History, Oxford Art Journal, RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, Sculpture Journal, Annales historiques de la Révolution française, Perspective, Journal of Visual Culture, and Nonsite, and he has also written for Artforum, Print Quarterly, French History, History Workshop Journal, Apollo, Cabinet, and the London Review of Books, among other places.

Works in progress include A Companion to French Art, 1789 to the Present (Wiley-Blackwell), a collection of thirty essays on French art, edited with Natalie Adamson. Richard is also developing projects on printmaker Charles Meryon and on nineteenth-century imposture. A linked article, on prints and photographs of royal impostors, received the 2017 Nineteenth-Century Studies Association Article Prize.

Specialisms

18th- and 19th-century French and British art; print culture; history and theory of science, media, and technology.

Selected Publications

• Time Machines: Telegraphic Images in Nineteenth-Century France (MIT Press, 2025)
• Time, Media, and Visuality in Post-Revolutionary France, ed. with Iris Moon (Bloomsbury, 2021)
• Interacting with Print: Elements of Reading in the Era of Print Saturation, co-authored as member of the ‘Multigraph Collective’ (University of Chicago Press, 2018)
• Art and Technology in Early Modern Europe, ed. with Genevieve Warwick (Wiley, 2016)
• The Politics of the Provisional: Art and Ephemera in Revolutionary France (Penn State University Press, 2013)

Full publications list on UCL Profiles.

Teaching & Supervision

Richard teaches a variety of modules at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. Recent MA special subjects have included ‘Art and Technology in Nineteenth-Century France’, and ‘Time, Media, Revolution: Art and Politics in France, 1789-1871’.

He welcomes enquiries from potential postgraduate students keen to research topics relating to eighteenth and nineteenth-century art and visual culture, politics, media, technology, and aesthetics, or that align in other ways with his research interests. Potential applicants should contact Richard directly to discuss their proposals.

Current PhD Supervision

• Isabelle Sagraves, ‘Félix Buhot and the Borders of Print in Nineteenth-Century France’ (UCL, Primary Supervisor)
• Glynnis Stevenson, ‘The bleus and the blancs: Revolutionary Commemoration and Political Coalition Building at the 1889 Decennial Exhibition of Fine Art’ (UCL, Primary Supervisor)
• Domenico Pino, ‘Printmaking in Eighteenth-Century Naples: Picturing, Recording, Communicating in the Southern Italian Enlightenment (1734–1799)’ (UCL, Primary Supervisor)
• Marie Giraud, ‘Women, Jansenism, and Print Culture in Eighteenth-Century Paris’ (Queen Mary University of London, Co-supervisor with Hannah Williams)
• Nicholas Babbington, ‘Held to Account: British Caricature and Financial Discourse, c.1780-1800’ (UCL, Primary Supervisor)

Completed PhD Students

• David Mitchell, ‘Something More than a Portrait: Antoine Benoist’s Wax Sculpture in Louis XIV’s France’ (2024, McGill University, Co-supervisor with Angela Vanhaelen)  
• Alexandra Ault, ‘Proof of the Proof: The Printsellers Association and the Fine Art Print Trade in Nineteenth-Century Britain’ (2023, UCL, Primary Supervisor)
• Rosalind Hayes, ‘Look to Your Eating: Animals, Meat, and Visual Culture in Britain c.1880-1910’ (2022, UCL, Primary Supervisor)
• Isabelle Masse, ‘Portrait du médium, médium du portrait: Les ‘spécificités historiques’ du pastel dans le long XVIIIe siècle’ (2019, McGill University, Co-supervisor with Angela Vanhaelen)
• Christina Smylitopoulos, ‘A Nabob’s Progress: Rowlandson and Combe’s The Grand Master, a Tale of British Imperial Excess, 1770-1830’ (2011, McGill University, Primary Supervisor)
• Tania Solweig Shamy, ‘Frederick the Great’s Porcelain Diversion: The Chinese Tea-House at Sans-Souci’ (2009, McGill University, Co-supervisor with Bronwen Wilson)

Contact

Office: 202, 20 Gordon Square
Office hours: Term 3, Mondays 12-1pm
Telephone: +44 (0)20 3108 4025 (internal 54025)
Email: r.taws@ucl.ac.uk