Rate My Professor Michael Newall

Dr Michael Newall is an Adjunct Research Fellow in the School of Art and Design, College of Creative Arts, Design and Humanities, at Adelaide University, where he is eligible to supervise Masters and PhD students. His career includes prior appointments as a lecturer at UniSA Creative, University of South Australia, teaching courses on visual culture and Australian art, and as Senior Lecturer in History and Philosophy of Art at the University of Kent, UK, where he served as Director of the Aesthetics Research Centre. Newall received the 2009 John Fisher Memorial Prize in Aesthetics from the American Society for Aesthetics. His scholarly work centers on the philosophy of art, pictorial representation, perceptual experience, and art education.

Newall is the author of key monographs including A Philosophy of the Art School (Routledge, 2019), analyzing the structure and value of contemporary art training, crit sessions, and artist formation; What is a Picture? Depiction, Realism, Abstraction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), investigating the mechanisms and ontology of pictures from realistic to abstract modes; and Impossible Colours: Colour Experience, Vision Science, and the Philosophy of Perception (Springer, 2026), examining impossible colours through phenomenological and scientific lenses. He has contributed chapters such as 'Double Portraiture' (in Portraits and Philosophy, Routledge, 2019) and 'Crits, consensus, and criticality: Making artists in the contemporary art school' (in Routledge Companion to Criticality in Art, Architecture and Design, 2018). Newall's journal articles appear in top venues like Synthese, Perception, British Journal of Aesthetics, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Philosophy Compass, and Philosophical Quarterly. Highlights encompass 'A study in brown' (Synthese, 2022), probing brown's perceptual peculiarities; 'Painting With Impossible Colours: Some Thoughts and Observations on Yellowish Blue' (Perception, 2021); 'Art and the approval of nature: Philosophical reflections on Tom Roberts, holiday sketch at Coogee (1888)' (Curator: The Museum Journal, 2019); 'Is seeing-in a transparency effect?' (British Journal of Aesthetics, 2015); 'Painting and philosophy' (Philosophy Compass, 2014); 'Pictorial resemblance' (Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 2010); 'Pictorial experience and seeing' (British Journal of Aesthetics, 2009); and 'Pictures, colour and resemblance' (Philosophical Quarterly, 2006). Through these contributions, Newall advances debates on depiction, colour phenomenology, and the intersection of philosophy with vision science and art practice.