Catherine Elizabeth Spencer

Catherine Elizabeth Spencer is a Senior Lecturer in Art History at the University of St Andrews, affiliated with the School of Art History and the Centre for Contemporary Art. Her research focuses on art’s intersections with political formulations, including intersectional feminisms, internationalism, transnationalism, and abstraction, with a geographic emphasis on the Americas and Europe. She has held prestigious fellowships, including an AHRC Early Career Leadership Fellowship and Paul Mellon Centre awards, supporting projects like Grassroots: Artmaking and Political Struggle and Life Support: Forms of Care in Art and Activism. Spencer is the author of Beyond the Happening: Performance Art and the Politics of Communication (2020) and co-editor of London Art Worlds: Mobile, Contingent and Ephemeral Networks, 1960–1980 (2018).

Her research explores feminist photographic practices, queer theory, and the abstract painter Jay DeFeo, with recent work analyzing abstraction in British art since the 1970s. She has curated exhibitions, written extensively for journals like Artforum and Art History, and supervised numerous PhDs in modern and contemporary art studies.

Spencer’s work contributes to UN Sustainable Development Goals related to gender equality and peaceful societies through her analysis of art’s role in political struggle. Her grants include projects on modernist salvage, counter cultures, and the sociological imagination in performance art.