Wood Roberdeau

Wood Roberdeau serves as Senior Lecturer in Visual Cultures and Programme Leader for the BA in History of Art at Goldsmiths, University of London. Previously, he was Head of Department in Visual Cultures from 2019-2022. He is actively engaged with multiple research centers including the Centre for Art and Ecology, Centre for Critical Global Change, Critical Ecologies Research Stream (which he chairs), Kitchen Research Unit, and served as Goldsmiths Pathway Lead for Sustainability and Climate Emergency on the SENSS Doctoral Training Programme from 2023-25.

• PhD in Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths, University of London (2008)
• MA in Contemporary Art, Sotheby's Institute of Art, London (2002)
• BA in French Literature and Philosophy, Colorado College, Colorado Springs (1999)

Roberdeau's research focuses on the intersection of art practices with ecological concerns, employing frameworks from environmental humanities, phenomenology, and philosophical post-humanism. His work explores how spatial concepts of dwelling and inhabitation resonate with climate change, developing what he terms 'eco-poetics' - examining cultural production and reception in times of climate crisis through concepts of encounter, observation, and participation. His specific interests include vital materiality, pollution studies, rural landscapes, planetary perspectives, and the politics of food and agriculture within contemporary art contexts.

His publications reveal a consistent trajectory examining environmental themes through visual culture, with recent work focusing on solastalgia, extinction studies, agricultural politics, and atmospheric phenomena. The publications demonstrate his interdisciplinary approach bridging art theory, environmental philosophy, and political ecology, with particular attention to scale effects, sensory experiences, and the representation of ecological crises in contemporary artistic practices.

Roberdeau has supervised doctoral research on diverse topics including networked retreat, shadow aesthetics, computational museums, food politics, territorial film, colonial dispossession, contemporary animism, and wildfire aesthetics. His teaching includes Space & Time, Inhabitations, Cohabitations, and the MA Contemporary Art Theory Core Course.

His ongoing work develops theoretical approaches to contemporary creative practices within environmental humanities, exploring the 'lived environment' and new concepts of political ecology or 'cohabitations' following twentieth- and twenty-first century eco-criticism.