Professor Sunil Manghani
Professor of Theory, Practice & Critique, Deputy Head of School, Director of Research and Enterprise

- Related links
- Personal homepage
Sunil Manghani is Professor of Theory, Practice & Critique and Deputy Head of School, Director of Research and Enterprise at the Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton. He studied Anthropology and Communication Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London, in the early 1990s, and later completed a Masters and PhD in Critical Theory at the University of Nottingham.
He teaches and writes on various aspects of critical theory, visual arts and image studies. He is a managing editor of Theory, Culture & Society, as well as an editorial board member of Journal of Contemporary Painting, and an associate member of Tate Exchange; University of Southampton’s Web Science Institute; and the Alan Turing Institute’s AI and Arts interest group. He is also a co-opted trustee for the Council for Higher Education in Art and Design, with a specific responsibility for its research alliance.
He teaches and writes on various aspects of critical theory, visual arts and image studies. He is author of Image Studies: Theory and Practice (2013), and co-editor of Rhythm and Critique (2020), Zero Degree Seeing: Barthes/Burgin and Political Aesthetics (2019); India’s Biennale Effect: A Politics of Contemporary Art (2016); Farewell to Visual Studies (2015), Images: A Reader (2006), and a special issue of Theory, Culture & Society: Neutral Life/Late Barthes (Vol.37, No.4, 2020); as well as editor of the multi-volume sets Images: Critical and Primary Sources (2013), and Painting: Critical and Primary Sources (2015).
He regularly publishes on the visual arts and culture and offers talks and workshops at conferences and events internationally. He has given talks at Tate Modern, Tate Britain, Eikones (Basel), transmediale (Berlin), National Media Museum, and the Kochi-Muziris Biennale in India. He is also a visiting professor at Southwest University in China. He has run art-related workshops at Tate Modern, John Hansard Gallery, Peter Scott Gallery and for Winchester’s biennale, 10 Days. He was co-curator of Barthes/Burgin, which exhibited at the John Hansard Gallery (2016), and co-author of the accompanying volume, Barthes/Burgin (Edinburgh UP, 2016); and was curator and producer of Building an Art Biennale (2018) and Itinerant Objects (2019) at Tate Exchange, Tate Modern. He was a contributor to the Heinrich Böll Foundation’s Dossier Burnt Images. The Relationship among Collective Memory, Remembrance Culture and Politics in Germany, and various Stone Summer Theory Institute publications in the USA. He was co-organiser and faculty member for the final Stone Summer Theory Institute, Farewell to Visual Studies, held at the School of the Art Institute, Chicago, in 2011.