| CARVIEW |
Kevin Hamilton
I am a Professor in the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where I served as Dean of the College of Fine and Applied Arts for six years before taking on my current role as Associate Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation in the Humanities, Arts, and Related Fields.
My daily administrative work lies primarily in supporting the development of others' creative and scholarly research. When at work on my own pursuits, my location in a Midwestern research university is one of the largest influences on the shape of what I make, and who I make it for. When people ask me what field I'm in as an artist and researcher, sometimes I answer New Media, or other times Art and Technology or even Visual Studies. In that respect, I'll be starting as Editor-in-Chief of the Leonardo series on MIT Press later in 2025.
I'd be glad to be in conversation with you about things we're both curious about, which could include:
The profound and lasting influence of the Cold War broadly, and nuclear weapons in particular, on our senses, bodies, and landscapes, shaping hope and possibility in the 21st century;
The role of new technologies in our experience of space, place, and community, especially through live remote presence; and how new technologies carry with them our most utopian hopes and oppressive bonds;
How life is better when lived with knowledge of what and who came before us (even and especially when lost) and how walking and other forms of slow mobility lead us closer to that life;
How the arts expand academic research, scholarship, and publishing to better represent the full range of ways in which humans sense (and make sense of) the world;
The challenges of arts leadership in higher education, including how to make a case for the value of our fields as they are, while also pushing them to be and do better with respect to the publics they serve;
The search for lasting and life-giving alternatives to today's more destructive forms of collective living, especially as found in theological and aesthetic traditions for which modern universities make little room.
And the ever-growing importance of fandom, weirdness, and showing up for artists of all kinds in pushing back against corporate media monoculture and anti-aesthetic regimes.
