Publications

BOOK

Otto Dix and the Memorialisation of World War I in German Visual Culture, 1914-1936 (Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2023). A chapter summary can be read here. Additional publication details can be found on the Bloomsbury website

BOOK CHAPTERS

Forthcoming: ‘The Portrayal of Suffering in Gert Wollheim’s Pictures of the First World War ‘, Has anything changed? The visualization of war violence in a diachronic perspective, eds. Ioannis Mylonopoulos and Nikoleta Tzani (New York: De Gruyter).

‘Between Art and History: Reconfiguring the Memory of World War I in Otto Dix’s Metropolis’, in Artistic Expressions and the Great War, A Hundred Years On ed. by Sally Charnow (New York: Peter Lang, 2020). DOI: https://doi.org/10.3726/b15605. This chapter examines how Dix’s large triptych Metropolis contributed to the shaping of war memory in Germany in 1928, ten years after the armistice, treating how the artist’s invocation of German artistic traditions and revocation of prevailing models of militant identity worked to reconfigure German memorialisation of World War I. Read about the book on the Peter Lang website

JOURNAL ARTICLES

Forthcoming, Summer 2025: ‘Willy Jaeckel’s Representations of Soldiers as Victims during the First World War in Germany‘, Soldier Victim, Special Issue of Journal of Aggression, Conflict and Peace Research (Emerald Publishing), ed. Stratis Efthymiou. Issue details to follow. Read abstract

10 March 2022: Antonio Gisbert’s Monument to Spanish Liberty: The Production of the Execution of Torrijos and his Companions on the Beach at Málaga (1888), Arts 2022, 11(2), 44. The monumental state-commissioned Execution of Torrijos and his Companions on the Beach at Málaga by Antonio Gisbert Pérez has only recently begun to receive earnest scholarly attention in Spanish-language literature after decades of relative obscurity, with no known lengthy discussion in English. Yet, it is a major Spanish history painting, commissioned as a monument to Spanish nation building in the wake of despotic monarchism. Introducing new material that builds on existing research, this essay offers a detailed analysis of the painting’s content and composition within its historical context. It carefully explores its production as a pivotal example of the Spanish visual culture of war and as a sensitively crafted memorial both to the men portrayed and the struggles of Spanish liberalism during the nineteenth century, a context that links it closely to Goya’s Third of May 1808, against which it is often compared, but which is at odds with the remarkably original composition of Gisbert’s work. Read full article on journal website

16 July 2021: The German Art Society Dresden vs. Otto Dix, Academia Letters, Article 1128. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL1128 This short article traces some of the DKD’s actions against Otto Dix from 1927-33. Read full article online

01 July 2020: In the Fray: Making and Meaning in Jenny Bowker’s Memorial Quilt After the Last Sky, H-Art Issue 7, Universidad de los Andes (Uniandes), Bogotá, Colombia, July 2020. This essay explores meaning and materiality in the monumental memorial quilt After the Last Sky by Australian art-quiltmaker Jenny Bowker, which memorialises the suffering of protesters during the Rabaa Square Massacre in Cairo on 14 August 2013. Read full article online

14 March 2020: Journal article: ‘Käthe Kollwitz: Memorialisation as Anti-Militarist Weapon’, Arts – Special Issue: World War, Art, and Memory: 1914 to 1945, ed. by Andrew Nedd, 2020). Abstract: This essay explores Käthe Kollwitz’s anti-war graphic work in the context of the German, and later, international No More War movement from 1920 to 1925, where it performed an important role in anti-militarist campaigns, exhibitions and publications, both in Germany and internationally. An interactive PDF can be downloaded here. Or read the essay on the journal website

EDITED COLLECTIONS

Constructing the Memory of War in Visual Culture since 1914: The Eye on War (New York: Routledge, 2018). https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203711385

Contributors address issues relating to propaganda, wartime femininity and masculinity, women as war artists, trauma, the role of art in soldiery, art as resistance, identity and collective memory. Read front matter and introduction…

Germanistik in Ireland Schriftenreihe, Vol. 3, Interrogating Normalcy: Proceedings of the Postgraduate Conference in German Studies, University College Cork, May 2011 (Konstanz: Hartung-Gorre Verlag, 2013, 146 pp).

Collection of nine peer-reviewed essays by postgraduates in German Studies, in collaboration with series editors Prof. Florian Krobb and Dr Jeff Morrison, National University of Ireland, Maynooth.

POSTGRADUATE PUBLISHED ESSAYS (PEER-REVIEWED)

‘A War of Images: Otto Dix and the Myth of the War Experience’ (2014), in Aigne (peer-reviewed online postgraduate journal of the College of Arts, Celtic Studies and Social Sciences, University College Cork). Read on the University College Cork website

‘Demythologizing War: The Experience of Soldierhood in Otto Dix’s Battlefield Pictures’ (2013), in Interrogating Normalcy, pp. 73–98. (Peer-reviewed).

‘Reformed Masculinity: Trauma, Soldierhood and Society in Otto Dix’s War Cripples and Prague Street’ (2011), in Artefact. The Journal of the Irish Association of Art Historians, pp. 16–31. (peer-reviewed) Read..

NON-PEER-REVIEWED

‘Behold Man: Apes with Guns’. Reflections on Modern Warfare in the Sculpture of James Horan. Accompanying critical essay for the touring exhibition Behold Man: Apes with Guns (solo show of stone sculpture by James Horan), Pearse Museum, Rathfarnham, Dublin, 9 May – 19 July 2015.

‘Propaganda rages on in World at War’, Irish Examiner (special commemorative supplement on the sinking of the Lusitania, 7 May 1915), 1 May 2015, p. 15.

BOOK REVIEWS

Forthcoming: Jack B. Yeats. Nationale Identitätskonstruktion in der irischen Modernen by Elisabeth Ansel (Köln: Böhlau, 2021), Burlington Magazine (issue details to be confirmed).

‘Otto Dix and the First World War: Grotesque Humor, Camaraderie and Remembrance’ by Michael Mackenzie (Peter Lang, 2019), First World War Studies 14, 2-3 (2023), pp. 402-403. https://doi.org/10.1080/19475020.2024.2322276.

Restoring a Wartime Master: On Irene Guenther’s Postcards from the Trenches. A German Soldier’s Testimony of the Great War (Bloomsbury, 2018), Los Angeles Review of Books, 5 January 2019. Read online: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/restoring-a-wartime-master-on-irene-guenthers-postcards-from-the-trenches/

Aga Skrodzka, Magic Realist Cinema in East Central Europe (Edinburgh University Press, 2014), Journal of Contemporary European Studies, Vol. 24, Issue 3 (2016).

Anna Schober, The Cinema Makers. Public Life and the Exhibition of Difference in south-eastern and central Europe since the 1960s (Intellect, 2013), Journal of Contemporary European Studies, Vol. 24, Issue 1 (2016).

Review of Peter Tame, Dominique Jeannerod and Manuel Bragança (eds), Mnemosyne and Mars: Artistic and Cultural Representations of Twentieth-century Europe at War (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), Journal of Contemporary European Studies, Vol. 23, Issue 1 (2015), pp. 163–164. Read…

Claudia Siebrecht, Aesthetics of Loss. German Women’s Art of the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), Reviews in History, Institute of Historical Research, University of London. Read online: http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/1615

EXHIBITION REVIEWS

Neue Sachlichkeit in Dresden: Paintings of the 1920s from Dix to Querner, Kunsthalle, Lipsiusbau, Dresden, 1 Oct 2011 – 8 Jan 2012, Enclave Review, University College Cork (2011), p. 15.