Chris Whitehead

Chris Whitehead
Newcastle University - ICCHS
Senior Lecturer

Chris Whitehead is Senior Lecturer in Museum, Gallery and Heritage Studies and member of the University's Cultural Affairs Steering Group and the Great North Museum's Board. He was Director of Research for the School of Arts and Cultures from 2006 until 2008 and was responsible for research strategy and income, RAE management and the general development of the research environment in Fine Art, Art History, Museum, Gallery and Heritage Studies and Music. From 2008 to 2010 he was Director of ICCHS. His research activities focus on both historical and contemporary museology. He has published extensively in the field of art museum history, with particular emphases on architecture, display and knowledge construction.
His second major strand of activity relates to education and interpretation practices in art museums and galleries, and includes considerable government-funded and policy-relevant research. In the context of musicological study he has strong interests in learning theory, social constructionism, theories of representation, cartography, disciplinarity and the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu.

Selected publications:

Whitehead, Chris. 2008. Museums and the Construction of Disciplines: art and archaeology in 19th century Britain. London: Duckworth Academic.

Whitehead, Chris. 2008. "Locating art. The display, construction and performance of place identity in art galleries." in Heritage and Identity: engagement and demission in the contemporary world. Marta Anico and Elsa Peralta (ed). London: Routledge.

Whitehead, Chris. 2007. "Establishing the manifesto: art histories in the nineteenth-century museum." in Museum Revolutions: How museums change and are changed. Simon J. Knell, Suzanne Macleod and Sheila Watson (eds), 48-60. London and New York: Routledge.

Whitehead, Chris. 2006. "Aesthetic Otherness, Authenticity and the Roads to Musicological Appropriation: Henry Cole's Travel Writing and the Making of the Victoria and Albert Museum." Studies in Travel Writing 10, (1): 1-26.

Whitehead, Chris. 2005. The Public Art Museum in Nineteenth Century Britain: The Development of the National Gallery. Farnham: Ashgate.