Dr Pippa Oldfield is a curator, photo-historian and former Head of Programme at Impressions Gallery, a public-funded centre for contemporary photography in Bradford. She is particularly interested in the ways in which photography intersects with gender, conflict, politics and history, and with issues of access and inclusion in the public arts sector. Pippa is Senior Lecturer in Photography and Course Leader for MA Photography, as well as teaching on BA Photography and MA Curating at MIMA School of Arts and Creative Industries. 

She holds a BA in Fine Art (Falmouth School of Art); an MA in the Photographic Image (Durham University) and a PhD in photography, war and gender (Durham University). Her academic research has been supported by Arts and Humanities Research Council, Durham University, and Peter E. Palmquist Memorial Fund for Historical Photographic Research.

Pippa has curated nationally touring exhibitions that are accompanied by public engagement programmes and publications. These include No Man’s Land: Women’s Photography and the First World War, funded by Arts Council England and Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. The first dedicated exhibition on the subject, it received national acclaim and was seen by over 100,000 people. She was co-project lead on an accompanying young people’s project, funded by Heritage Lottery, which received a National Creative Learning Guild award and was showcased in the House of Commons.

Pippa has delivered talks and contributed to debates at The Photographers’ Gallery (London), the National Science and Media Museum (Bradford) and Open Eye Gallery (Liverpool), and via broadcast media including Women’s Hour on BBC Radio 4 and The History Hour on BBC World Service, as well as Radio 5 Live, and BBC Breakfast News. She has participated in international academic conferences featuring key theorists and practitioners, most recently Women, Photography, Conflict at Nikolaia Tesla Museum, Zagreb, convened by the AHRC project Fast Forward.

As well as being a peer reviewer for Photography and Culture, Photographies, Humanities, and Routledge’s history series, Pippa is on the editorial board of Journal of War and Culture Studies. Her writing has been published in peer-reviewed journals including History of Photography  features in numerous books and catalogues published by Impressions Gallery, Dewi Lewis, Rose Issa Projects, and MuseumsEtc, among others. Her monograph Photography and War, published by Reaktion, is described as ‘essential reading’ by Sophie Wright, Global Cultural Director at Magnum Photos.

She is co-editor of the forthcoming publication Picturing Peace: Photography, Conflict Transformation and Peacebuilding, part of Bloomsbury's series New Encounters: Arts, Cultures, Concepts edited by Griselda Pollock.

Pippa is currently working on the monograph Ungentle Camera: War and Women's Photography, and developing a major research project Rethinking the Photography of Gertrude Bell. 

For more information on these and other projects, see Pippa Oldfield's website.

Dr Pippa Oldfield welcomes applications for both written and practice-based PhDs from candidates investigating themes of photography, visual culture, curation, cultural history, gender, women's histories, war and conflict, history, politics, peacebuilding, activism, and social justice. Please feel free to contact her to discuss further.