LMH Feminist Society: Griselda Pollock on Feminist Intellectual Histories

Join the LMH Feminist Society for a special event with alumna and acclaimed feminist art historian Griselda Pollock. Find out more about the event below.

Feminist Intellectual Histories / Histories of Feminist Intellectuals: A Situated Perspective from 1968 to 2026

Since antiquity, there have been many different moments in history of feminist intellectual radicalism posing profound challenges to both social systems and their cultures. Graduating from LMH in 1970 as a historian, I chose to participate in one of most intense of these eruptions of feminist radicalism, The Women’s Liberation Movement, at the same moment that I decided to focus professionally on Art History. Discontent with that discipline’s narrowed focus and its distorted stories of art that had evacuated all creative women from its narratives, I then participated in the feminist cultural and theoretical revolution that laid the foundations for my 50-year academic career. 

My talk will move between critical biographical reflection and political-cultural framing of the equivocal legacies of being a woman student at and in Oxford circa ‘1968’ viewed from the present moment. As the title suggests, the combination of terms, feminist and intellectual, are anything but self-evident, yet there is a rich history we are constantly having to recover and reassess. There will be pictures and movies to illustrate my projects.

About Griselda Pollock 

Griselda is Professor emerita of Social & Critical Histories of Art at the University of Leeds (1977-2021), is 2020 Laureate of the Holberg Prize, recipient of the 2023 CAA Life-time Achievement Award for Writing on Art, the 2010 CAA Distinguished Feminist Award for Promoting Equality in Art and the Nessim Habif World Prize 2024 (in Arts and Humanitie) from the University of Geneva. 

Major texts include Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology with Rozsika Parker (1981; 4th edition: 2022 Bloomsbury, Polish 2025), Vision and Difference: Feminism, Femininity and the Histories of Art (1988/ 2021), Charlotte Salomon in the Theatre of Memory (Yale University Press, 2018), Killing Men & Dying Women: Imagining Difference in 1950s New York Painting (Manchester University Press, 2022), WOMAN IN ART: Helen Rosenau’s ‘Little Book’ of 1944 (Yale University Press, 2023), Feminism, Pedagogy and the Studio/Atelier: Reflections across Four Decades (Sternberg Press with Villa Arson, 2025). Forthcoming: Marilyn Monroe at Work: A Cultural Analysis (Bloomsbury).