Dr James Ryan

Dr James Ryan's research interests lie in the historical and cultural geography of modernity and concern three overlapping fields, which are broadly connected with histories of design and material culture: histories of photography, visual and material culture; British colonialism and imperialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and Anglo-American geographical knowledge, technology and science.

Much of his research concerns the contested meaning and practice of photographic representation and the power of photographs – as visual and material culture –  to shape human understandings of the world. Previous work has explored the ways in which photography was used within projects of British imperialism in the nineteenth and early twentieth century (see Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualisation of the British Empire 1997), as well as the evolving relationship between photography and the geographical imagination (see, for example, Picturing Place: Photography and the Geographical Imagination, 2003, co-edited with Joan M. Schwartz).

James' research is based mostly on historical collections of images and objects in UK libraries, archives and museums. Drawing on interdisciplinary approaches, particularly with regard to photography and material culture, he seeks to contribute to debates across a range of disciplines, including cultural and historical geography, design history, art history, anthropology, nineteenth-century studies and visual culture studies.

James has received research funding from a range of organisations including the British Academy, the Leverhulme Trust and the Royal Geographical Society. He has given invited presentations on his research to several international research institutions including Harvard University Art Museums and the Yale Center for British Art. In 2014–15 he was awarded a British Academy-Leverhulme Senior Research Fellowship for research on the work of the Victorian Cornish photographer, geologist and folklorist Robert Hunt.