Steve Baker
Steve Baker is Emeritus Professor of Art History at the University of Central Lancashire in England, where he remains affiliated to the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, and is a trustee of the Norfolk Contemporary Art Society. A seminal figure in the field of Animal Studies, Baker is the author, most recently, of ARTIST|ANIMAL (Minnesota UP, 2013), in addition to previous books including The Postmodern Animal (Reaktion Books), Picturing the Beast: Animals, Identity, and Representation (Illinois UP), and, with the Animal Studies Group, Killing Animals (Illinois UP). Chapters from his books have been reprinted in Routledge’s Animals and Society: Critical Concepts in the Social Sciences, and in Berg’s The Animals Reader: The Essential Classic and Contemporary Writings. Selected publications have been translated into French, German, Dutch, Swedish, Italian, Polish and Spanish. Dr. Baker is a prolific researcher and speaker who has published many dozens of scholarly articles and given scores of public talks in since 2000 alone.
ARTIST|ANIMAL, published in 2013 in the University of Minnesota’s “Posthumanities” Series, explores contemporary art’s engagement with questions of animal life through detailed case studies of individual artists’ practices. The prominent American artist Mark Dion praised Baker for his “rigorous ethnographer's eye” and his “deep understanding of the nuance, intricacy, and contradictions in how artists work today.”
Since 2008, in spite of ‘retirement’ status as an Emeritus Professor, Baker has continued his work in animal studies, contributing chapters to major edited collections in the field and delivering public lectures and conference keynotes in the UK, USA, Europe and Australia. He is an Advisory Board member of the Penn State UP book series, “Animalibus,” and a member of the editorial boards of numerous animal studies journals internationally. Since 2010 his artwork has been shown in two European museums and in group exhibitions in the UK, USA and Australia, and it has been reproduced and discussed in several academic journals.
In 2014, Baker gave the closing plenary address at the conference “Animals and their People: The Fall of the Anthropocentric Paradigm?” in Warsaw, and a public lecture at the symposium “Sensibilities: Animals, Plants and Artists” at the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center in Troy, New York. Work from his Scapeland series was shown at the Museum of Contemporary Sculpture in OroĊsko, Poland, as part of the exhibition “Ecce Animalia.” His essay “Dead, dead, dead, dead, dead,” was published in The Routledge Handbook of Human-Animal Studies. In 2013 Baker’s work was included several group exhibitions in the United Kingdom. He gave a series of public lectures in Norwich and Glasgow to launch ARTIST|ANIMAL, and spoke at the University of Central Lancashire symposium on “Posthumanism and the Viewing Subject.” In 2015, Baker’s artwork was shown in exhibitions in Germany, the United States, and the UK.
Steve Baker earned his Ph.D. in the History and Theory of Art from the University of Kent at Canterbury.
Sponsored by the Animal Studies Program, the Department of Psychology, the Department of Art & Design, and the Honors Program
Sources:
http://www.uclan.ac.uk/staff_profiles/dr_steve_baker.php
Published on March 23, 2017