Who's who

Keywords

Media philosophy, Translation, Vilém Flusser, Writing in the Disciplines

Research interests

If our communications medium shapes the way we think, speak, imagine and exchange with one another, then the shift from writing and print to digital communication may be transforming us from a literate to a visual culture. I am interested in speaking and writing about a range of topics in this broad area.

Trained as an art historian with a strong interest in photography, Nancy Roth has worked as an art and photography critic as well as a lecturer. Her first publication examined a 19th-century photographic study of facial expression by the French physiologist Duchenne de Boulogne.

She earned a PhD at the City University of New York in 1996 with a dissertation on the German photomontage artist John Heartfield (1891-1968), part of which has recently been published in the Oxford Art Journal. Many of her current interests can be traced back to key features of Heartfield's work, namely the juxtaposition of photographic images and texts, the boundaries between artistic and "mass" media (Heartfield's work appeared regularly in a mass-circulation newspaper), and the implications of artistic collaboration.

She has a long-term interest in the tensions-and attractions-between artists and writing, and between images and texts, which led her to the work of Vilém Flusser (1920-1991). Flusser is a philosopher known primarily to German-speaking readers as a theorist of new media, although his thought ranged from language and writing to photography, architecture, design, science, technology, and national identity. She has completed a translation of one of his books, Into the Universe of Technical Images from German to English, and plans to translate more books and articles, as well as drawing on the concepts discussed in them for her own critical writing.

Recent outputs

• Vilém Flusser (2011) Into the Universe of Technical Images, and Does Writing have a Future? Introduction by Mark Poster, Translation from the German by Nancy Ann Roth, Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press.
• Invited participant in Digital Hybridity, a research project organised through D-MARC (Digital and Material Arts Research), University of Derby, 1 April - 17 June, 2011.
• Roth, N. (2010) "Kamaraden und Kohlköpfe: John Heartfield im Universum der technischen Bilder," in Medien Denken, Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag.
• _______ (2010) "Writing as Pretext: On the Way to an Image," 256-264 in: Arts and Humanities in Higher Education 9(2) June 2010
• _______ (2008) "Photographic Migrants: John Goto's West End Blues", Flusser Studies, flusser-studies. 07 (November, 2008) , available at www.flusserstudies.net/pag/archive07. Reprinted as 4-10 in: Activate 5 (2009), London Metropolitan University, The Sir John Cass Department of Art, Media and Design.
• ____ (2008) "Reflections on the Future of History: John Goto's A Dance to the Music of Time," Eyemazing 03-(Amsterdam) Gallery 36-45.

Selected earlier outputs

• (2006) ‘Heartfield's Collaboration', Oxford Art Journal 29:3, pp.1-24.
• (2005) Three entries, "Painting and Photography," "Photography Criticism," and "Richard Billingham" in Oxford Companion to the Photograph, Robin Lehman, ed., 2005.
• (2005) "Collaboration and Originality" (catalogue essay on artistic collaboration, accompanying exhibition of work by Mark Dunhill and Tamiko O'Brien) 8-12 in: Sculptomatic, Bristol: Dunhill and O'Brien. Also available at www.collabarts.org

Current research / forthcoming outputs

• Forthcoming: ‘Visual Consciousness: The Impact of New Media on Literate Culture' (on Vilém Flusser and Visual Culture), The Handbook of Visual Culture, eds. Barry Sandywell, Ian Heywood, Oxford: Berg
• Forthcoming (20 October 2011): "Translation for a Recovered Text," presentation at Pavillion, Leeds, on a commissioned work by the filmmaker Lucy Skaer, "Film for an Abandoned Projector".
• Forthcoming: Vilém Flusser, "The Gesture of Writing," introduction and translation by Nancy Ann Roth, New Writing: The International Journal of the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing
• Forthcoming: Vilém Flusser, "The Gesture of Photographing," introduction and translation by Nancy Ann Roth, Journal of Visual Culture 10(3) December 2011.
• Ongoing: Updating content of: www.nancyannroth.com and www.flusseronphotography.co.uk

Membership of learned societies, subject associations

• EATAW (European Association for the Teaching of Academic Writing)
• APHE (Association for Photography in Higher Education)
• HGCEA (Historians of German and Central European Art)
• Rhizome (new media art)

Editorial Boards

• Advisory Board: Journal of Writing in Creative Practice; Flusser Studies

Supervision of research degrees

I am currently supervising three research students:

• Jason Bate, Medical Photographs of Facial Injuries sustained in the First World War
• Joanna Millett, The Material Quality of Film in Temporal Perception
• Chris Engdahl: Creating a Choreographic Community through On-line Communication

I have supervised to completion one PhD candidate and have examined one PhD candidate.

I am particularly interested in supervising research in Phenomenology of writing, photography, film (or potentially other media)

Contact