is Professor of Cultural and Political History, Associate Dean of Research and Director of Graduate School for Camberwell, Chelsea and Wimbledon Graduate School, University of the Arts London. He has written two single-authored books that trace, firstly, the aesthetic of politics in twentieth-century fascism and secondly, the intellectual history of a politics of the aesthetic in nineteenth-century Britain. Between the publication of these two books, he collaborated with Professor Dany Nobus of Brunel University on a study of psychoanalytic approaches to knowledge and identity. This collaborative research has informed the analysis of ‘the utilitarian conversion’ in nineteenth-century thought and its role in defining a new politics of art and taste that is offered in his latest book Utilitarianism and the Art School in Nineteenth-Century Britain, London: Pickering and Chatto 2012. His work consists of three related strands of research: