Richard Read is an Emeritus Professor and Senior Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia where he has taught art history for 30 years.
He has published in major journals on the relationship between literature and the visual arts, the history of art theory, nineteenth and twentieth-century European and Australian art history, American and Australian landscape painting, contemporary film, and complex images in global contexts.
He wrote the first book on the art critic Adrian Stokes and his latest book is an anthology of essays on intimations of the Anthropocene in nineteenth-century Australian and North American landscape painting.
A long-term book project is The Reversed Painting in Western Art. Other current projects include a short book on the interpretative energy that travelling between countries brings to their respective art works in an era of tension between ‘home’ and ‘away’ in nationalist politics and essays on Pierre Bonnard and other ‘Low Power’ Artists, Goya, Mistakes in Art, and the art of Nola Farman.
Since retirement he has travelled extensively, and taken residences at the University of Durham, Yale University, and NES Artists Residency in Skagaströnd, Iceland.
He enjoys lecturing locally and internationally and for the first time is making some of his travel and personal writings available.