Jo Applin

Jo Applin is a specialist in modern and contemporary art, with a particular emphasis on American art since 1960. She studied at Essex University and UCL, where she was subsequently Henry Moore Postdoctoral Fellow. She joined The Courtauld in 2016, after eleven years teaching at the University of York. In 2008 Jo was Associate Scholar at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal, and in 2012 the recipient of a Philip Leverhulme Prize. In 2016 she was Visiting Scholar at the University of Cambridge Centre for Gender Studies, a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, and Senior Scholar at the Terra Foundation Summer Residency in Giverny.

Jo’s research addresses questions of materiality, abstraction, eccentricity, feminism, sexuality, and subjectivity. She is the author of Eccentric Objects: Rethinking Sculpture in 1960s America (Yale University Press, 2012) and Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirror Room-Phalli’s Field (Afterall and MIT Press, 2012), and is currently completing two further books, Not Working: Lee Lozano versus the Art World 1961-1971 (Yale University Press), which was awarded the Suzanne and James Mellor Book Prize from the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington D.C. in 2015, and London Art Worlds: Mobile, Contingent and Ephemeral Networks 1960-1980 (Penn State University Press), which she is co-editing with Catherine Spencer and Amy Tobin. She is also embarking upon a new book about ageing and abstraction in American art since 1940, and co-editing a special issue of Oxford Art Journal on feminism and domesticity, to be published in 2017.

Jo is reviews editor of Oxford Art Journal, and sits on the boards of ARTMargins, Tate Papers, and the Terra-Tate Research Project Refiguring American Art 1945-1980. Jo has also published widely on contemporary art and is an active critic, writing regularly for Artforum and other publications. She has also reviewed books and exhibitions for TLS, Oxford Art Journal, Map, Journal of American Studies, West 86^th, Modernism/Modernity, The Art Book, and Sculpture Journal.

Flesh, a major loan exhibition Jo has co-curated, will open at York Art Gallery in September 2016.

Jo is a member of the editorial boards of Oxford Art Journal (currently also Reviews Editor), ARTMargins, and Tate Papers. She also sits on the Academic Advisory Board for the Terra Foundation/Tate Research Project Refiguring American Art 1945-1980.