Dr Jon King

I am a Research and Innovation Associate in the School of English working on the AHRC-funded project An Art of Looks: Elizabeth Bishop and Visual Culture. I completed my BA, MA, and PhD in History of Art at the University of York, where my WRoCAH-funded doctoral research examined the intersections of art, writing, and domestic space in the work of Vanessa Bell and the Bloomsbury Group. My research explores the relationship between word and image in the modern period, focusing not only on paintings and fine art, but on letters, postcards, photographs, and other everyday objects that reveal how creativity is lived and recorded. I am particularly interested in the affective, relational, and archival dimensions of modern art and literature, and in how figures such as Virginia Woolf and Angelica Garnett translate acts of looking and remembering between image and text.

Before joining Sheffield, I held research and curatorial fellowships at the National Gallery, where I led the Women and the Arts research strand and organised major public research events including Widening the Narrative: Women Artists, Copyists, Dealers and Artists in Residence (2024) and Hidden Histories of the Museum: Women Transforming Art Collections (2025). As Curatorial Fellow, I also contributed to the research, interpretation, and administration of exhibitions including Discover Constable and the Hay Wain (2024) and Wright of Derby: From the Shadows (2025). I previously worked as a researcher at the Ben Uri Gallery and Museum, where I explored the role of Jewish and immigrant artists in shaping British modernism, and as a Graduate Teaching Assistant in History of Art at the University of York, where I taught on the Materiality of Art and Architecture. 

My forthcoming monograph, Vanessa Bell and Charleston: Motherhood, Queerness and the Domestic Imagination (Bloomsbury, 2026), examines the domestic, maternal, intergenerational, and collaborative nature of modern British art. My research has been published and commissioned by institutions including Tate Papers, Women’s History Review, Bloomsbury Publishing, and the National Gallery.