Professor Zoë Strother is a specialist in Central and West African art history, with a special focus on the 20th-21st centuries. She has conducted research in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Mali, and Senegal. Her broad intellectual project is to understand the relationship between the image and the social imaginary and its changing history. She has also studied the representation of Africa in the European imaginary through past or future projects addressing: Sara Baartman (the “Hottentot Venus”); Carl Einstein; Vladimir Markov; Leni Riefenstahl. Her current research concentrates on the history of iconoclasm in Africa.
Believing that it is imperative to situate African art in dialogue with other fields and disciplines, she also serves as contributing editor for Res: Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics and associate editor for Art in Translation, a new e-journal seeking to make available in English critical texts on visuality from around the world.
