Colin Cruise

Research Lecturer
DipAD (Hornsey) PGCE (Middx) MLit (Keele) PhD (Keele) Photograph of Colin Cruise .

Contact

Email: colin.cruise@aber.ac.uk
Phone: 01970 622084

Biography

Before starting an academic career in Victorian Studies, Cruise studied Fine Art, specialising in printmaking and painting. His PhD thesis concerns English Literature of the 1890s in relation to religion, art, and gender. He has published widely on aspects of Victorian culture, including ‘Versions of the Annunciation’ (After the Pre-Raphaelites, MUP 1999); ‘Baron Corvo and the Key to the Underworld’ (The Victorian Supernatural, CUP 2003); and ‘Sincerity and Earnestness: Rossetti’s Early Exhibitions’  (Burlington Magazine, January 2004).  He contributed three entries on Victorian artists to the Dictionary of National Biography.  Recent publications include book chapters on Pater (for Macmillan), on Burne-Jones (for the Yearbook of English Studies) and on Simeon Solomon (for Ashgate); he has a forthcoming chapter on drawing in The Cambridge Companion to Pre-Raphaelitism.

Cruise curated the major exhibition Love Revealed: Simeon Solomon and the Pre-Raphaelites (2005-6)—which toured Villa Stuck, Munich, and the Ben-Uri Gallery, London—and organised the accompanying conference for the National Portrait Gallery, London (2006), and the symposium at Yale BAC (2006). The exhibition catalogue was published by Merrell in 2005.

Cruise is a Member of the AHRC Peer Review College (since 2007); a Member of both the AHRC Postgraduate Panel (since 2008) and Collabrative Doctoral Awards Panel (since 2010); and served as Chair of the Association of Art Historians (2004-07).  He is a member of the academic advisory panel for a major JISC-funded project to digitise all Pre-Raphaelite works at BMAG and is curator of an international touring exhibition on Pre-Raphaelitism, The Poetry of Drawing (catalogue to be published by Thames and Hudson in December 2010).  He was the holder of the first Pre-Raphaelite Fellowship jointly awarded by the University of Delaware and the Delaware Art Museum in 2008.

Teaching and research supervision covers 19th-century art and its cultural contexts in social history and religion; Pre-Raphaelitism; the Aesthetic Movement; the identity of the artist in British art c.1800-c.1960; the history of drawing.