Association for Art History Fellowship awarded to Professor Gavin Butt

Professor of Fine Art, Gavin Butt has been announced by the Association for Art History as one of their 2025 Fellows, an honour awarded on the basis of his innovative research in the field, and its engagement with audiences beyond academic art and art history worlds.

2025 is the sixth year for the Association of Art History Fellowship, with Fellows being recognised for their significant contribution to the broad field of art history. Fellowships are awarded to academics, curators, educators, artists, and advocates of Art History who have advanced knowledge within the field or brought public support and attention to the subject more broadly.

Currently researching histories of UK art education as Professor of Fine Art at Northumbria University, Professor Gavin Butt is a writer and creative researcher who explores the significance and impact of visual art in the contexts of popular music, queer culture and performance.

Professor Butt trained as an artist and art historian at Goldsmiths and the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds, where he completed an MA in the Social History of Art in 1989. He received his PhD from the University of Leeds in 1998 with the dissertation Men on the Threshold: The Making and Unmaking of the Sexual Subject in American Art 1948-1965.

As a successful author, Professor Butt’s latest book No Machos or Pop Stars: When the Leeds Art Experiment Went Punk (2022) was launched at a special event at the University of Leeds alongside an exhibition of art by post-punk musicians, Becoming The Ouroboros.

He is also the author of Between You and Me: Queer Disclosures in the New York Art World (2005), editor of After Criticism: New Responses to Art and Performance (2005) and co-editor of Post-Punk Then and Now (2016).

Alongside scholarly output, Professor Butt works collaboratively on creative research projects including Mixed Up: Music and the Art School (2025), Performance Matters (2009-2013), This Is Not a Dream (2011) and The Art School Dance Goes On (2023).

Speaking about the Fellowship Professor Butt said: “I am honoured to have my work recognised by the Association for Art History and to join other Fellows whose work has been paradigm-shifting and formative in my own intellectual development. The award is particularly meaningful to me because it recognises the contribution of my expressly multidisciplinary work and its address to readers and audiences across books, project and exhibition curation, LP production and filmmaking."

Exisiting AAH Fellows include Rasheed Araeen, T.J. Clark, Kobena Mercer, Griselda Pollock and Lisa Tickner. Joining Professor Butt as Fellows for 2025 are Althea Greenan (Special Collections and Archives at Goldsmiths, University of London) and Craig Clunas (Professor Emeritus of the History of Art, University of Oxford).