Rate My Professor Richard Read

Richard Read is Emeritus Professor of Art History and Senior Honorary Research Fellow in the Discipline of Art History, UWA Design School, at the University of Western Australia. He earned a BA Honours and MA from the University of Cambridge and a PhD from the University of Reading. His academic career includes positions as Tutor in English at the University of Reading (1981–1983) and the University of Melbourne (1983–1985), Lecturer in Art History at the University of Queensland (1985–1989), and at UWA as Lecturer (1990), Senior Lecturer (1998), Associate Professor (2004), Professor (2009), and Winthrop Professor (2011), before becoming Emeritus Professor in 2015. Read has held numerous visiting fellowships and scholarships, including Getty Institute Summer Seminar (1999), Paul Mellon Fellow at the British School at Rome (2001–2002), Institute of Advanced Studies at Durham (2005), Benjamin Meaker Visiting Professor at Bristol (2010), Senior Research Fellow at East Anglia (2011, 2014), and residencies at Yale Center for British Art (2019) and the British School at Rome (2019).

Read's research specializations encompass relations between literature and the visual arts, Giotto, Rembrandt, the British Grand Tour of Italy, nineteenth- and twentieth-century art critical theory, Adrian Stokes, Cubism, theories of perception, museum studies, the reversed canvas, landscape painting, and film studies. Key publications include his prize-winning book Art and Its Discontents: The Early Life of Adrian Stokes (Ashgate, 2002; Penn State University Press, 2003), the first monograph on the critic; contributions to The Reversed Painting in Western Art (ARC Discovery Grant-funded project); co-edited anthology Colonization, Wilderness, and Spaces Between: Nineteenth-Century Landscape Painting in Australia and the United States (Terra Foundation/University of Chicago Press, 2020); and recent chapters such as 'The Impact of Colonialism on the Western Distinction between Art and Craft' (2024) and 'Presentism and Anthropocenic Unawareness in Early Western Australian Settler Art' (2026). Awards include the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand Book Prize (2003), UWA Award for Excellence in Research Supervision (2013), and commendation for best article in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art (2010). A prolific international lecturer, he has delivered public talks at institutions including Tate Britain, National Gallery of Victoria, and King's College Cambridge, and served as external editor for The Outwardness of Art: Selected Writings of Adrian Stokes (Ridinghouse, 2020).