I received my PhD from Trinity College Dublin for a thesis on the work of the artist Marcel Duchamp and the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. As assistant lecturer at Limerick School of Art and Design (Technological University of the Shannon), I deliver undergrad and postgrad modules on Media Literacy in Art & Design Education. These modules explore how psychoanalytic approaches to art and design give rise to a materially-grounded model of digital literacy, suitable to the challenges posed by AI.
Between 2020-2023 I was Curator for Modern & Contemporary Art and, subsequently, Head of Collection Studies at the Louvre Museum’s flagship initiative in the Arabian Gulf, the Louvre Abu Dhabi. Since 2017, I have been adjunct lecturer at the Sorbonne University’s Abu Dhabi campus, where I deliver a postgrad module on Aesthetics and Historiography as part of the MA in History of Art & Museum Studies. Since 2023, I have guest lectured on the MA in Art History, Collections and Curating at University College Dublin. I also intervene on the MA in Fine Art at New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD).
My teaching and research explore the relation between technology, art and contemporary subjectivity by probing what I term the ‘infra-disciplinary’ relation between art history, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. I have published widely in these fields and I am author of Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain: One Hundred Years Later (Palgrave 2017), a theoretical reading of Duchamp’s most famous readymade marking the centenary of the work’s production. My writings have appeared in French, German and Arabic in collective publications alongside contemporary thinkers such as Catherine Malabou, Slavoj Žižek, Jean-Luc Nancy and Alain Badiou (forthcoming), whose work I critically engage with. I am a regular contributor to the International Journal of Žižek Studies (IJŽS) and Lacunae, the English-language journal published by the Association for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy in Ireland (APPI). In 2023, I contributed a chapter to Psychoanalysing the Rise of the Small Screen: The Year the Cinemas Closed (Routledge), exploring the notion of ‘Digital Tectonics and Cinematic Intimacy’ in a post-pandemic age.
I have designed and taught on roughly 15 modules over almost 20 years in the areas of: Art & Design Education, Media Literacy (Limerick School of Art and Design), Museum Studies and Curatorial Practices (University College Dublin), Art History and Aesthetics, Applied Foreign Languages (Sorbonne University Abu Dhabi), French Language and Literature (Trinity College Dublin) and English Language and Literature (University Rennes 2).
I have also designed and delivered professional training workshops for The National Heritage Institute of France (INP) to museum professionals working in the Abu Dhabi Saadiyat Cultural District (Louvre Abu Dhabi, Guggenheim Abu Dhabi). The subjects of the training are: Producing and Updating Scientific Knowledge in the Museum; Identifying Credible Sources in the Production of Scientific Content in the Museum (specific emphasis on AI).
My research supervision (PhD, MA) relates to the fields of Art history, Aesthetics, Curatorial Practices (within globalist/decolonial paradigms) and Art & Design education. I am currently supervising postgraduate research (MA and PhD) relating to such topics as: Embedded Curatorial Practices (TUS, Clare County Council); Student self-efficacy in the Art Classroom; Scaffolded Approaches to Art Appreciation Visual Literacy; Student Self-Efficacy (autonomy, competence, and relatedness) in the Art Classroom (LSAD/TUS).