Professor Andrew McNamara
Fellow
- Bio/Profile
- Andrew McNamara is an art historian and Professor, Visual Arts, Creative Industries Faculty of QUT, Brisbane, Australia. He received his PhD in 1994 at the Power Institute, University of Sydney. His research has increasingly focused on the modernist legacy for contemporary art and culture, which he regards as contradictory or paradoxical rather than a purely negative or positive phenomenon. This consideration was first explored in the publication, An Apprehensive Aesthetic? The Legacy of Modernist Culture (Peter Lang Publishing) 2009. In addition, with Ann Stephen and Philip Goad, McNamara published Modernism & Australia: Documents on Art, Design and Architecture 1917-1967 (2006—awarded the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand Book of the Year Prize in 2007) and also Modern Times: The Untold Story of Modernism in Australia (2008). Other publications include, Sweat—the subtropical imaginary (2011), plus Surpassing Modernity: An Ambivalent Quest (Bloomsbury, London, forthcoming). McNamara is part of the Brisbane Consortium for the Visual Arts; an executive member of the “scientific committee” of the European Network for Avant-Garde and Modernist Studies (EAM); on the National Advisory board of the Australian Modernist Studies Network (AMSN); and is Australian chair of the Comite International D’Histoire de l’art (CIHA). In 2012, he was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.
