• Arts, Histories and Cultures
• Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in the Arts (CIDRA)
• People
  • Professor Jackie Stacey
  • Dr Atreyee Sen
  • Professor Janet Wolff
  • Professor Frank Mort

Janet Wolff, Professor Emerita

I joined the University of Manchester in 2006, having taught earlier at the University of Leeds and, in recent years, in the United States. I was director of the PhD programme in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester, New York, from 1991 to 2001, and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs in Columbia University's School of the Arts from 2001 to 2006.  My books include The Social Production of Art (1981/1993), Aesthetics and the Sociology of Art (1983/1993), Feminine Sentences: Essays on Women and Culture (1990), Resident Alien: Feminist Cultural Criticism (1995), AngloModern: Painting and Modernity in Britain and the United States (2003), and The Aesthetics of Uncertainty (2008).
My work has been on the sociology of art and culture; gender and culture; modernism and modernity; English and American early twentieth-century art; and aesthetics. My last book, The Aesthetics of Uncertainty, addresses the problem of aesthetics after critique: the 'return to beauty', the challenge to the anti-aesthetic and the possibility of principled judgment in the light of post-critical relativism. More recent essays discuss older women in the city; the turn to affect in cultural theory; W.G.Sebald's writing about Manchester; the poetics of sociology.
On retirement from the university in July 2010, I have turned to non-academic writing. I am working on a book which combines family history, memoir, trans-Atlantic reflections, and visual imagery. I am also beginning a book (cultural history/personal account) about Manchester, as well as co-editing (with Mike Savage) a special issue of the John Rylands Bulletin on Manchester's cultural institutions, 1800-2010.