Research Catalogue

Dr. Nicola Foster works in the interdisciplinary area between art history, philosophy and art practice and has recently been elected to the Executive Board of the Association of Art Historians. Since the early 1990s she has been actively involved in the debate that led to the establishment of 'practice-led' research in the UK and has been supervisor of research students at Wimbledon School of Art (now University of the Arts, London) ever since. She supervises research in the area of drawings including lens-based work, performance and installations. She also supervises MA Dissertations in art history at the Open University and is external supervisor at the University of Bournemouth. She holds qualifications in all three academic areas (art practice, philosophy, art history) with MA project in photographic practice and Urban Culture (Goldsmiths College, London) MA Dissertation in philosophy 'Time as the Gift in Derrida and Levinas', (University of Essex) and PhD entitled 'The Ontology of Chōra: Heidegger and Sexual Difference', (University of Essex). She was previously on the Editorial Board of 'Women's Philosophy Review' where she was also guest co-editor for the issue on Aesthetics. She is currently working on developing a model for reinterpreting drawing looking at the dialogue between Europe and its others, with particular interest in south east Asia. At the same time she also continues to work on various receptions and developments of Heidegger and how such approaches might be useful towards deeper understanding of what counts as research in/through art practice and its potential epistemological and ethical potential implications.

Publications include:

Books

Co-editor (with P. Florence) 2000, Differential Aesthetics: Art Practices, Philosophy and Feminist Understandings. Ashgate.

Co-editor (with P. Florence) Special Issue onAestheticsfor Women’s Philosophy Review, No.25 Autumn 2000

Chapter ‘Aesthetic Hybridity and the Dominance of the Visual’ in Art, History and the SensesP. di Bello and G. Koureas (eds.) 2010, Ashgate

Chapter ‘Anthropology, Mythology and Art: Reading Beuys Through Heidegger’in Beuysian Legacies in Ireland and Beyond: Art, Culture and Politics, ed. Lerm-Hayes LIT Verlag as part of the European Studies in Culture and Policy series, 2011

Articles and Reviews

‘On Husserl’, Women’s Philosophy Review, no. 17, Autumn 1997.

Review on Body-and Image-Space: Re-Reading Walter Benjamin by S. Weigel. Women’s Philosophy Review, No. 18, Spring 1998.

With P. Florence, Review Article on Feminism and Tradition in Aesthetics, eds. P.Z. Brand and C. Korsmeyer. Women’s Philosophy Review no. 19, Autumn 1998

N. Foster, ‘Boundaries of Sight and Touch: Memoirs of the Blind and the Caressed’ (Re-Reading Drawing(s): Derrida, Irigaray and Nancy Spero), Conference paper given at Loughborough University, September 1999. Published in (CD format) Drawing Across Boundaries, ed. Judith Mottram, LUSAD, 2000.

N. Foster, ‘Why Art Must not Have an Ethic and Why Art Calls for an Ethic’, Conference paper given at Central Saint Martin College of Art and Design, 7^th July 1999. To be published in Matrix 4/for Research

Book Review of The Continental Aesthetic Reader (ed. Clive Cazeaux), Women's Philosophy Review, (2004)

Book Review of Gender and Aesthetics, by Carolyn Korsmeyer & Differences and Excess in Contemporary Art, by Gill Perry, British Journal of Aesthetics, (July 05, Vol. 45, no 3)

Photography as social Archaeology: Riga’ article and photographs Street Signsautumn 2006, published by the Centre for Urban and Community Research, Goldsmiths College

Commissioned article forParallaxVol 47 Spring 2008, entitled: 'Photography and the Gaze: The Ethics of Vision Inverted'.

Commissioned review article on Matrixial Borderspace for Radical Philosophy January 2008, ‘The Eurydice Complex’

commissioned Review of Plato and Sex by Stella Sandford for Radical Philosophy, August 2011

Commissioned review of Further Adventures of the Dialectic of Sex Critical Essays on Shulamith Firestone for New Formation July 2011