Dr Mike O'Mahony
Reader in History of Art
BA, PhD (London)
Office: 2.28, 9 Woodland Road
Phone: +44 (0)117 954 6085
Email: mike.omahony@bristol.ac.uk
Mike O'Mahony studied History of Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art (BA 1991, PhD 1998). His thesis examined representations of sport and physical culture in official Soviet art during the inter-war years. Before joining the University of Bristol in 2000 he taught modern art at many institutions including Winchester School of Art and the Courtauld Institute of Art. He has also lectured at many London museums and galleries including the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Tate Gallery, the Hayward Gallery, the Barbican Art Gallery, the Royal Academy of Arts and the Courtauld Gallery.
His recent research and publications have examined: the visual culture of sport and the Olympic Games; representations of sport and physical culture in official and unofficial Soviet art; the fate of Soviet public monuments in the post-Soviet era; the Moscow metro; the work of Aleksandr Deineka; and the films of Sergei Eisenstein. He has recently completed a two-year Leverhulme Research Fellowship studying the relationships between sport and its representation in visual culture with particular emphasis on the Olympic Games. He is currently running a visual project called My Games which seeks to build an alternative visual archive to reflect everyday experiences of the 2012 London Olympic and Paralympic Games. His next project will be looking at photography and sport.
Mike O'Mahony welcomes applications from students undertaking research into the representation of sport in western art and popular culture; Soviet and Post-Soviet visual culture; the role of public monuments in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; the relationship between art and film; and other areas of twentieth-century art practices.
Research interests
Sport and visual culture; Russian visual culture in the twentieth century, especially official art of the Soviet period; Late and Post-Soviet cultural developments; the Moscow metro; the promotion and reception of Soviet culture in the international arena.
Publications
Authored books
- Olympic Visions: Images of the Games through History, Reaktion Books Ltd, London, 2012
- Спорт в СССР (Translation into Russian of Sport in the USSR: Physical Culture – Visual Culture), новое Литературное Обозрение, Санкт-Петербург, 2010
- Sergei Eisenstein (in series Critical Lives), Reaktion Books Ltd, London, 2008
- Sport in the USSR: Physical Culture – Visual Culture, Reaktion Books Ltd, London, 2006
- Picasso, Flame Tree Publishing, London, 2006
- American Art, Flame Tree Publishing, London, 2006
Joint edited books
(with Mike Huggins), The Visual in Sport, Taylor and Francis, 2011
Joint edited journals
- Sport and the Visual, special double issue of The International Journal of the History of Sport, vol 28:8-9, 2011 (with Mike Huggins).
Academic journals (refereed)
- 'In the Shadow of Myron: The Impact of the Discobolus on Representations of Olympic Sport from Victorian Britain to Contemporary China' in The International Journal of the History of Sport, (forthcoming April 2013, but preview article is available at http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09523367.2012.657628
- ‘Prologue: Extending Study of the Visual in the History of Sport’ (with Mike Huggins) in Sport and the Visual, special double issue of The International Journal of the History of Sport, vol 28:8-9, 2011
- ‘Imaging Sport at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art’ in Sport and the Visual, special double issue of The International Journal of the History of Sport, vol 28:8-9, 2011
- ‘Epilogue’(with Mike Huggins) in Sport and the Visual, special double issue of The International Journal of the History of Sport, vol 28:8-9, 2011
- ‘Bringing Down the Tsar: “Deconstructing” the Monument to Aleksandr III in Sergei Eisenstein’s October’ in Sculpture Journal, vol 15:2, 2006
- ‘Re-Inventing Arcadia: Aleksandr Deineka’s Images of the South’ in Blok: The International Journal of Stalinist and Post-Stalinist Culture, no 4 2005
- ‘Juvenile Delinquency and Art in Amerika’ in Art on the line no 1 2004
- ‘Archaeological Fantasies: Constructing History on the Moscow Metro’ in Modern Languages Review, January 2003
Popular journals
- ‘Записки из Πодземки: Московское Метро и Физкультура в 30-е годы XX века’ (Notes from the Underground: The Moscow Metro and Fizkultura in the 1930s) in Неприкосновенный Запас (Neprikosnovennyi Zapas), no 3(23) 2002 (in Russian).
Contributions to books
- ‘Introduction’ to the Sites and Media section in Budy,Sandra, Nikolaus Katzer, Alexandra Köhring and Manfred Zeller (eds), Euphoria and Exhaustion: Modern Sport in Soviet Culture and Society, Campus-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 2010.
- ‘The Moscow Metro’ in Valerie A. Kivelson and Joan Neuberger (eds), Picturing Russia: Essays on Visual Culture, Yale University Press, 2008
- ‘Aelita’, chapter in The Cinema of Russia and the Former Soviet Union (ed. Birgit Beumers, in the series, 24 Frames), Wallflower Press, London, 2007
- Entries on ‘The Moscow Metro’, ‘Ernst Neizvestnyi’, ‘Vera Mukhina’s Worker and Collective Farm Woman’ and ‘Oleg Tselkov’ in Helena Goscilo, Karen Evans-Romaine & Tatyana Smorodinskaya (eds), Encyclopedia of Contemporary Russian Culture, Routledge, Oxford, 2006
- ‘Foreword’ and c.20 entries in World Art: The Essential Illustrated History, Flame Tree Publishing, London, 2006
- ‘Europe 1900-2000’, ‘Italy 1900-2000’ and ‘Germany, Austria and Switzerland 1900-2000’ in Atlas of World Art (ed. John Onians), Laurence King Publishing 2004
- ‘The International Style’ in The Oxford Illustrated History of Western Art (ed. Martin Kemp), Oxford University Press, 2000
- Introductory Essay in Essential Art Deco, The Foundry Press, London 2000
- Biographies of various artists, mostly Russian in The Year 1900: Art at the Crossroads, ex. cat., Royal Academy of Arts, London and The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2000.
- Biographies of many artists in The Encyclopaedia of Artists, Andromeda Oxford Ltd, Oxford, 2000.
- Introductory Essay in Essential Surrealists, The Foundry Press, London, 1999
Reviews for journals
- ‘Allen Guttmann, Sports And American Art from Benjamin West to Andy Warhol, 2012’, in International Journal of the History of Sport, Volume 29, Issue 11, 2012
- ‘Karla Oeler, A Grammar of Murder: Violent Scenes and Film Form’, (Chicago), 2009 in Studies in Soviet and Russian Cinema, vol 4, no 3, 2010
- ‘S. Wagg & D.L. Andrews (eds), East Plays West: Sport and the Cold War, (London, Routledge), 2007’ in International Journal of the History of Sport, Volume 25, Issue 4, 2008
- ‘Stalinist Values: The Cultural Norms of Soviet Modernity, 1917–41 (by David L. Hoffmann), in Modern Language Review, Vol 100, No 3 July 2005
- ‘Sightseeing Trip from the Arnolfini Marriage to Abbey Road’ (Review of Visual Culture by Richard Howells), Times Higher Education Supplement, 27 May 2005.
- ‘Antony Gormley: Domain Field’ in Art on the line no 1, 2003
- ‘Centaur: The Life and Art of Ernst Neizvestny’ (by Albert Leong) in Slavic and East European Review vol 81, no 4 (December 2003)
- ‘Centaur: The Life and Art of Ernst Neizvestny’ (by Albert Leong) in The British Journal of Aesthetics vol 43, no 4 (October 2003)
- ‘Aelita’ Review of Yakov Protazanov’s 1924 movie in The Anglo Soviet Journal, Volume 51 nos. 2 & 3, Summer 1991