New Network Convenors Announced

We are pleased to announce the appointment of Cai Lyons as the Convenor of the Early Career Researchers Network and of Ed Kettleborough and Senah Tuma as the Co-Convenors of the Doctoral Researchers Network for 2024/25.

Cai Lyons (they/them) is an independent art historian and received their PhD from the University of Birmingham in 2023. Cai's thesis critically analysed the early career of Dublin-born artist Mary Swanzy, forwarding the artist’s exhibiting practice as pivotal to her professionalism in the early twentieth century. Their research interests include the materiality and lives of artworks in exhibition, professional identities of women artists in the early twentieth century and Irish women artists of the late nineteenth and twentieth century.

Cai currently works at the University of Birmingham to support postgraduate student experience in the College of Arts and Law, and is passionate about researcher development.

Cai will continue the work of Co-Convenors Rosalind Hayes and Chloe Asker, who developed a stimulating series of events focusing on research-sharing and skills development for the Network in 2023/24.

Ed Kettleborough is an Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded PhD candidate at the Universities of Bristol and Exeter. His research focuses on the artists who emerged from the Royal College of Art between 1958 and 1963, including David Hockney, Pauline Boty, Frank Bowling, RB Kitaj, Allen Jones and Derek Boshier. Their early work is both understudied and consistently characterised as British Pop Art, occluding a thorough conceptualisation and understanding of the group's achievements. More generally, Ed is interested in art after 1945, neo-Dada, Pop and the neo-avant-garde in a global context, as well as any theoretical engagement with continental philosophy, critical theory and psychoanalysis.

Senah Tuma is a doctoral student at the University of Cambridge. She is a transdisciplinary researcher, with a background in history of art and now working within visual art education investigating the affectual-emotional dimensions to race, placing this understanding within the context of art and its spaces. As such, Senah has a particular interest in anti-racist and decolonial work as well as museum and gallery design. She is passionate about anti-racist themes such as community and care.

Ed and Senah will continue 2023/24 Co-Convenors Lucy Shaw and Jennifer Warren’s work to develop the network and organise a series of informative events focusing on training and research-sharing.

Both the Doctoral Researchers Network and Early Career Researchers Network are free to join: fill out this form if you are currently working towards a doctorate, or this form if you are an early career researcher (we see this as either post-doctoral scholars who are within ten years of receiving their doctorate, or researchers who have followed non-traditional routes and have gained the equivalent research experience).