Dr Claudia Tobin

Dr Claudia Tobin is a writer, curator and lecturer, broadly specialising in the interactions between modern and contemporary art and literature. She is a Senior Research Associate at the Intellectual Forum, Jesus College Cambridge and a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies, UCL. In 2017 she was awarded a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the University of Cambridge for her project on colour and the imagination. She has worked in arts organisations and held fellowships across Europe and the US, most recently at the Harvard Centre for Renaissance Studies (I Tatti) in Florence.

At the Royal Drawing School, Claudia runs the Lecture Programme and in 2020 she launched a new virtual Creative Conversations series featuring artists, writers and curators. She has designed and taught on a range of courses at the School, complementing a decade of experience teaching History of Art and English Literature at the University of Cambridge and Bristol University. 

Claudia is committed to raising the profile of women artists past, present and future. Virginia Woolf is one of her guiding stars and she has contributed to two major exhibitions exploring the writer’s relationship to artists: Virginia Woolf: Art, Life and Vision at the National Portrait Gallery (2014), and Virginia Woolf: An Exhibition Inspired by her Writings (Tate St Ives, Pallant House, Fitzwilliam Museum). Other research and curatorial collaborations include working with Tate, the British Museum, and the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art, as well as with international commercial galleries and contemporary artists. She co-curated Jerusalem in Exile: Artist’s Books by Kamal Boullata, which was commended as The Times’ ‘Critics’ Choice’ (January 2020), and has contributed to documentary arts films and radio broadcasts, most recently BBC Radio 3’s ‘Free Thinking’. 

Claudia is co-editor of Ways of Drawing: Artists' Perspectives and Practices (Thames & Hudson, 2019). Her first book Modernism and Still Life: Artists, Writers, Dancers (Edinburgh University Press, 2020) explores ‘still life’ and the idea of the transformation of the ordinary across different media in prose, poetry, painting, dance, and sculpture in the early twentieth century. Her research has been supported by awards from the AHRC, the Leverhulme Trust, the Arts Council, and the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art.