Christopher Townsend

Christopher Townsend is Professor of the History of avant-garde Film in the Department of Media Arts, Royal Holloway, University of London.

His research examines the way in which artists corrode the boundaries between media, particularly within modernism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, or use new technologies to extend the analysis of art’s formal rhetoric and the boundaries of subjective experience within film, photography and performance.

Recent scholarly publications have concentrated on the activity of the European modernist avant-garde in relation to ideas of intermediality and simultaneity in the 1910s and 1920s, including studies of Francis Picabia, Fernand Léger, Henri-Martin Barzun and Ricciotto Canudo.

Christopher Townsend