Patricia Allmer

Professor Patricia Allmer is a leading scholar and curator of surrealism, its modern traditions, and its contemporary legacies, with particular focus on women surrealists and on the work of René Magritte. Her current research focusses on Germanophone women artists and writers and their intersections with surrealism. Her new book The Traumatic Surreal: Germanophone Women Artists and Surrealism after WWII is published by Manchester University Press (2022). She was awarded a 2021/22 Leverhulme Research Fellowship. Professor Allmer curated, and edited the catalogue for, the award-winning Angels of Anarchy: Women Artists and Surrealism (Manchester/Prestel, 2009), the first major international exhibition of women artists and surrealism. The Guardian called Angels of Anarchy a “milestone in rediscovering the secret history of the 20thcentury” (https://tinyurl.com/y3urknyh). The exhibition's significant and continuing impact on public, curatorial, and academic and critical recognition of women artists as key figures in surrealism has most recently been noted in The Art Newspaper (2019) (https://tinyurl.com/syl8sdb). She was awarded the 2010 Philip Leverhulme Prize in acknowledgment of her contributions to art history. She co-curated, and co-edited the catalogues for, Taking Shots: The Photography of William S. Burroughs (Prestel: 2014) and 4 Saints in 3 Acts: A Snapshot of the American Avant-garde in the 1930s (Manchester University Press, 2017), both held at The Photographers' Gallery in London. She has directed and co-directed a range of public programmes accompanying these exhibitions and which now constitute open-access online resources (see https://tinyurl.com/y28dpcl8), initiated and convened the 2009 Association of Art Historians’ Conference in Manchester, and organized and chaired Judy Chicago’s Manchester lecture and masterclass in 2011. Professor Allmer has published three books on René Magritte, with her latest, René Magritte (Reaktion Press, 2019) revealing, for the first time, the significance of fairground attractions in Magritte’s art – from carousels and circuses to panoramas and stage magic. In recognition of her expertise on Magritte, she was the 2017/18 guest speaker for the prestigious Chaire Internationale Emile Bernheim programme in Brussels (http://edin.ac/2HIZtgj). Her monograph Lee Miller: Photography, Surrealism, and Beyond is published by Manchester University Press (2016, http://tinyurl.com/hh8eezt) and has been described as “groundbreaking” (Caitlin Davis, Woman’s Art Journal, Fall/Winter 2017). The Swedish national broadsheet Svenska Dagbladet’s double-spread review noted the book as “the most extensive and in-depth analysis of Miller’s visual work to date” (Jonas Ellerström, 9 September 2017). Her edited collection Intersections: Women Artists/Surrealism/Modernism (Manchester University Press) came out in October 2016. Professor Allmer's other major publications include the co-edited collections 'Wonderful Things' – Surrealism and Egypt (Dada/Surrealism, 20.1: 2013), European Nightmares: European Horror Cinema Since 1945 (Wallflower/Columbia University Press: 2012), Re/reading RE/Search (European Journal of American Culture, 30.2: 2011), Collective Inventions: Surrealism in Belgium (Leuven University Press, 2007), and The Forgotten Surrealists: Belgian Surrealism Since 1924 (Image [&] Narrative 13: 2005).