June 2025: the site is currently being edited; please excuse its appearance.
About me
I am an Art Historian based near Hamburg, Germany. To date, my research has focused primarily on the impact of war on visual culture since 1800 and German art from 1850 to 1945. My central concern is how art produced during times of conflict/post-conflict engages with the sociopolitical as well as artistic conditions in which it is created, how it is perceived and examined, and how consequent primary and secondary research on such art is affected by socio-political perspectives.
My first monograph, Otto Dix and the Memorialisation of World War I in German Visual Culture, 1914-1936 (Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2023), supported by a Royal Irish Academy Charlemont Grant, is a deep analysis of the role of Dix’s war pictures in the broader context of war memorialisation in Germany, and closely considers contemporary critical reception as redolent of social and political conditions and attitudes to the lost war.
I contribute regularly to the academic community through editorial work at De Gruyter, peer review and presentation of my research findings through scholarly conferences and publications.
Beyond academia, I am also a professionally-qualified art teacher, and have taught in Ireland, Spain (through Spanish and English) and Germany (through German and English). I consider my work as an art teacher integral to my personal development as an art historian, and my students receive an art education with a strong awareness of art-historical contexts in relation to the development of their project work and approach to materials.
Ongoing work (as at June 2025)
- the documentary drawings and paintings created by Gert Wollheim (b. Germany, 1894-1974) during and after the two world wars,
- graphic work created by Willy Jaeckel (b. Poland, 1888-1944) during the First World War,
- and the study of a selection of recent work by contemporary British artist Richard Meaghan in which I treat how his exploration of illness, personally experienced, reflects both the artist’s personal responses to the portrayal of masculinity in post-World War I art and persistent challenges to a truly pluralistic, heterogeneous masculinity.
Orcid ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7394-3091
Section Editor, Open Cultural Studies (De Gruyter)
Member, Association for German Studies in Great Britain and Ireland (AGS)
Full Member of the Teaching Council of Ireland as a State-qualified Art Teacher.
Dr Ann Murray 