Susannah Thompson is an art historian, writer and critic. She is Professor of Contemporary Art and Criticism at GSA.

Susannah holds a PhD in History of Art from the University of Glasgow, an MPhil in Art and Design in Organisational Contexts from The Glasgow School of Art and an MA (Hons) in History of Art from the University of Glasgow. She also holds a PG Cert in Academic Practice from University of Edinburgh (2014), is a Fellow of the HEA and (since 2017) a member of the Executive Board of the Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities.

Before taking up her position at The Glasgow School of Art in 2017, Susannah worked at Edinburgh College of Art (ECA), University of Edinburgh, as Director for Postgraduate Research (2014-17), Co-Director of Visual Culture (2011-14) and Lecturer in Visual Culture (2006-2017) in the School of Art.

Susannah’s research has been widely published in journals including the British Art Journal, Visual Studies, Journal for Writing in Creative Practice, Journal of the Scottish Society for Art History and Visual Culture in Britain. Her doctoral research (2010) examined artists’ writings in Scotland published between 1960-1990, focusing on alternative and experimental modes of writing and post-criticism, writing as a part of visual art practice and the role of samizdat and ephemeral publications within contemporary art in Scotland. Her course, Art Writing, was a core component of the MA Contemporary Art Theory programme and ran between 2010-2017, the first of its kind in Scotland. As well as her role as Head of Doctoral Studies she is an experienced PhD supervisor and contributes to Masters programmes at GSA.

Alongside academic research, Susannah has also worked as a freelance critic, art writer and curator since 2000. She has extensive curatorial and programming experience and as a writer and critic has contributed to magazines and journals including Art Review, The Burlington Magazine, Flash Art, Even, Contemporary, Modern Painters, Circa, Variant, A-N and MAP. She has written numerous catalogue essays and gallery texts for artists and organisations including Tramway, CCA, Transmission, Sorcha Dallas, Washington Garcia, Mary Mary, Street Level Photoworks, The Glasgow School of Art, Leeds College of Art, Linn Lühn (Cologne), Collective (Edinburgh) and YYZ (Toronto). She is a member of AICA (International Association of Art Critics).

Susannah's research interests are in the broad area of contemporary art history and visual culture, with a particular emphasis on interdisciplinary and feminist approaches to: Art Writing; Criticism/Post-Criticism; Art Historical writing; Fiction / Literature and/in/as Art; Contemporary Art Theory; Contemporary Art; Feminism; Class; 20th Century Painting; Scottish Art (20th century and contemporary). Current research projects include (separate) work on the Scottish artists Maud Sulter, Cordelia Oliver, Pat Douthwaite and Joan Eardley.

Selected recent and forthcoming publications and projects:

Scotland and Surrealism: co-investigator on the RSE-funded, cross-institutional network (with Prof Patricia Allmer, Edinburgh College of Art and Dr. Grainne Rice, National Galleries of Scotland). The network seeks to bring together international researchers, artists and curators who will explore the range and depth of Scotland's engagement with Surrealism and its legacies in the twentieth century and beyond. As well as convening a panel for the Association for Art Historians in 2021, the network's activities have included four digital workshops, a conference in 2022 with further activity planned for 2023.

With Jenny Brownrigg (GSA), Susannah is co-author of an extended academic article tracing the early years of the painter and GSA graduate Joan Eardley, published in The British Art Journal in Spring 2022. The article contests dominant readings of Eardley's development and re-examines her diverse and wide-ranging work of the 1940s. A further, solo authored essay on Eardley 'Letters from Joan', has also been published for the edited book 'All Becomes Art' (Speculative Books).

'Spark's Spinsters', Susannah's contribution to book 'The Crooked Dividend: Essays on Muriel Spark' considers the relationship between the lives of women writers and their material and domestic conditions, specifically the role of bedsits and boarding houses in Spark's life and early novels.

You can read Susannah’s art criticism at: www.artreview.com, https://mapmagazine.co.uk/, https://contemporary.burlington.org.uk/ and more.

Current PhD Students:

Rebecca Meanley
A Hyper-Present State: Experiential Encounters in the Act of Painting and the Act of Writing
This research investigates the relationship between mind, brain and body and the existence of consciousness, from inside the act of making, in gestural abstract painting and genre-shifting writing. Symbiotic paths of practice-led research are generated simultaneously. In both acts of making, an intuitive relationship with duration and temporality is initiated in continual attempts to capture the present. Co-supervised with Dr Laura Haynes and Dr Zoe Mendelson

Kyla McDonald
Re–discovery, Restoration and Revision: investigating the position of women artists within recent curatorial trends in Europe and North America. Funded by AHRC's Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities Doctoral Training Partnership. Co-supervised by Professor Patricia Allmer, Edinburgh College of Art and Dr Adele Patrick, Glasgow Women's Library.

Storm Greenwood
Unravelling Text: Reading as a Polyphonic Practice.
Funded by Techne/Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities. Co-supervision with Dr Laura Haynes (GSA)