Rupert Nuttle

Rupert Nuttle

First Name: 
Rupert
Last Name: 
Nuttle
Title: 
PhD Candidate
Biography : 

Rupert Nuttle is a PhD candidate and Course Instructor in the Department of Art History at the University of Toronto. He specializes in the histories of photography, 19th- and 20th-century visual cultures, archival methodology and art writing. His research focuses on instances where photographic media intersect with hegemonic forms of power, especially in colonial, corporate-capitalist and imperialist societies.

Prior to his doctoral studies, Rupert worked as a freelance journalist and art writer. His articles have appeared in Canadian Art, C Magazine, Espace art actuel, National Gallery of Canada Magazine and RACAR: Revue d’art Canadienne/Canadian Art Review.

 

Selected Publications

  • Review of Art's Realism in the Post-Truth Era, eds. Marianne Boetzkes and Maryse Ouellet (Edinburgh University Press, 2024). Co-authored with James Michael Levinsohn. RACAR: Revue d’art canadienne/Canadian Art Review 51, Fall 2025.
  • “Pissarro's prints: light, atmosphere and ‘plein air’.” National Gallery of Canada Magazine, December 6, 2019. Online.
  • “Ghost in the Image: Julie Mehretu’s Haunted Vision.” National Gallery of Canada Magazine, March 1, 2019. Online.
  • “End of the Tunnel: Art, Technology and the Natural Sublime.” National Gallery of Canada Magazine, January 23, 2019. Online.
  • Review of Esmaa Mohamoud, THREE-PEAT; Oreka James, If the other does not see me, I do see myself; and Michèle Pearson Clarke, All That is Left Unsaid. C Magazine Issue 138, Summer 2018. 46-47.

 

Education: 
MA, Art History, University of Toronto, 2020
MJ, Carleton University, 2017
BFA, Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 2013

People Type:

Research Area:

Areas of Interest: 
  • 19th-century visual culture
  • History and theory of photography
  • Vexations, errata, and nonhuman agency in early photography
  • Chronophotography and the moving image
  • Photography, surveillance, and docile bodies
  • Colonialism, settler colonialism, and decolonization
  • History of science
  • New materialisms

Program:

Cohort:

Dissertation Title: 
Corporate Photo Baroque: History Dreaming in the Goodrich Company Archive
Dissertation Supervisors: 
Mark A. Cheetham
Dissertation Description: 

"Corporate Photo Baroque: History Dreaming in the Goodrich Company Archive" takes up the project of critically retelling the early history of the B. F. Goodrich Corporation, a defunct American rubber company, through the lens of its understudied photographic records.

Across chapters that cover the neo-colonialism of rubber procurement, labour and commodification, factory buildings as mnemonic signs, and the public theatrics that bound private profits to a nationalistic polity, "Corporate Photo Baroque" deploys a materialist approach in the photographic archive to mount a structural critique of the birth of American corporate-imperialist aesthetics.

Presentations: 
“‘Alive with Death!’: Repair and Irreparability in the Corporate Photo Archive.” 116th College Art Association Annual Conference, Chicago, IL. “Beyond Paranoid and Reparative: New Methods in Photo-History” Session. February 18, 2026.
“Souvenirs of Hyderabad: Photographs and Diamonds as Self-Reproducing Organs of Capital in the Princely State.” The North American Conference on British Studies, Montréal, QC. November 13, 2025.
Administrative Service: 
Co-Chair, Wollesen Memorial Symposium Committee, University of Toronto Dept. of Art History, 2020-21.
Other Website: 
Substack: 
https://leftsidestory.substack.com/

Campus: