Rate My Professor Matthew Poole

Matthew Poole is a professor of art history and theory in the Department of Art and Design at California State University, San Bernardino, holding the title of Professor, Art Theory, Curatorial Studies. He earned a BFA (Hons.) in Fine Art from the Ruskin School of Fine Art, University of Oxford (1993-1996), and an MA in Fine Art from the University of Northumbria, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, UK (1996-1997). Poole's career includes serving as Professor and Chair of the Department of Art and Design at CSUSB from 2015 to 2021. Since 2022, he has been Interim Chair of the Department of Communication Studies while continuing as Professor in Art and Design. Prior to CSUSB, he was Programme Director of the Centre for Curatorial Studies and Senior Lecturer/Associate Professor in Contemporary Art History and Theory in the Department of Art History and Philosophy at the University of Essex, UK (2002-2012). He also held a Research Fellowship at the Centre for Curatorial Studies, University of Essex (2012-2013), and adjunct professorships at the California Institute of the Arts, School of Critical Studies (2014-2015), and Woodbury University (2013-2014).

Poole's research specializations include modern and contemporary art history and theory, curatorial history and theory, museology and curatorial studies, and the political and socioeconomic ramifications of art production, distribution, and reception. His interests extend to post-Marxian political theory, materialist philosophies, speculative epistemologies, post-Fordist labor models, and neoliberal governmentality in relation to art. Key publications feature co-editing The Politics of Parametricism: Digital Technologies in Architecture (Bloomsbury Press, 2015) with Manuel Shvartzberg; chapters such as "Infrastructure, Ideology, Hegemony" in Between the Material and the Possible: Infrastructural Re-examination and Speculation in Art (MIT/Sternberg Press, 2022), "Allography and the Baroque Agency of the Objectile" in Construction Site for Possible Worlds (Urbanomic Press, 2020), and "Marcel Duchamp’s Diagrammatics of Love, Sex and Erotics" in Glass Bead Journal Site 2: Dark Room – Somatic Reason and Synthetic Eros (Glass Bead, 2019); and forthcoming co-editing The Edinburgh Companion to Curatorial Futures (Edinburgh University Press, 2025). As a curator and writer based in Los Angeles, Poole has organized exhibitions including the PILOT series (2005-2008), "The Mortar of Distribution" at LoBe Gallery, Berlin (2010), and edited projects like The AGMOAS is Now a Corporate Audit by Terry Atkinson (kynastonmcshine Press, 2017). He guest-edited the special issue "Anti-Humanist Curating" for the Journal of Visual Arts Practice (2011).