Dr Alice Butler
- Tutor (Research)
- Photography MA
- Tutor (Research)
- Arts & Humanities MFA
Alice is a writer and interdisciplinary scholar who works across feminist art history, practice, theory, and literature to explore questions of sickness, sexuality, and gender.
Alice is a Tutor (Research) in the School of Arts & Humanities. She is a contemporary art historian and writer specialising in the intersections of recent and contemporary feminist art and writing. She publishes her work across scholarly and creative outputs and contexts.
Her research interests span queer-feminist art writing practices/methods; queer and feminist theory; experimental, affective approaches to the archive; and formations and questions of gender, sexuality, race, and sickness. Alice attends to embodied scenes, intimate relations, and the possibilities and problems of care in feminist lives and works.
Alice is the author of Close Writing: Kathy Acker, Cookie Mueller, and Love-in-pieces, which is forthcoming with Duke University Press. Gestures: A body of work, an edited volume of essays and dialogues that she co-edited alongside Nell Osborne and Hilary White, will also be published by Manchester University Press in early 2025. In her research and teaching at the RCA, she is committed to probing and practising the possibilities of experimental writerly form and creative methodologies of attention and care. She is a Tutor on the Photography programme; on which she leads the “Writing Images/Images Writing” practice group and contributes lectures, workshops, seminars, and tutorials. She is also Tutor on the Arts & Humanities MFA; on which she leads the “Health and Care: Poetics of Care – to welcome, to love, to recover” elective unit. School-wide, Alice also supervises PhD students working across (and between) practice and theory and matters relating to her research. As a writer-scholar researching sexed and gendered histories of sickness, illness, and pathology, Alice is a founding member of the School’s Health & Care Research Cluster. She is also a member of the School’s Research Development Group.
Alice has previously held research fellowships at The Courtauld Institute of Art (2021–2), Paul Mellon Centre (2020), and the AHRC/Freud Museum London (2019). She was awarded her PhD from the University of Manchester, for an AHRC-funded creative-critical project on the queer feminist art writing of Kathy Acker and Cookie Mueller, in 2019. Prior to this, she was awarded a First Class Honours in English Literature and Art History from the University of Sussex (2011) and an MA in Critical Writing in Art & Design from the Royal College of Art (2013).
Alice’s interdisciplinary, feminist research supports the breadth of her interdisciplinary teaching across the arts and humanities. She has taught widely across arts and humanities subjects, and at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, at UK higher education institutions, including The Courtauld, University for the Creative Arts, University of Gloucestershire, and University of Manchester. In correspondence with her own creative-critical work, she is interested in emerging pedagogical dialogues between critical humanities scholarship and practice-based arts and creative writing disciplines.
Key details
School, Centre or Area
Gallery
More information
Research Interests
As a writer-theorist-historian of contemporary art, art writing, visual culture, and word-image relations through feminist, queer, and critical race frameworks, Alice’s research is focused on representations and performances of embodied states, encounters, and scenes of writing, desire, sickness, and love. Her creative and critical (often cross-genre/cross-historical) work engages intersectional feminist and queer perspectives and experimental, embodied approaches to archive, autotheory, and correspondence. She is interested in how taking risks with literary form—like the writing of a love letter—can open out new and inventive ways of taking risks with content and critical ideas. This is central to her extensive research on, and with, the autofictional archives, letters, literatures, artworks, images, performances, and photographic portraits of downtown New York feminist writers, Kathy Acker (1947-1997) and Cookie Mueller (1949-1989). It also informs current research on feminist and queer artists and writers’ embodied usages of textiles in photographic, poetic, and performance work.
Further research interests, fields, and methods include:
- Art history and visual culture through feminist, queer, decolonial, postcolonial, and critical race frameworks
- Feminist and queer art and writing practices
- Art writing as object, practice, and critical methodology
- Histories, practices, and theories of letter writing and correspondence
- Formations, representations, performances, and theories of gender, sexuality, dis/ability, sickness, and race
- Illness narratives in art and literature
- Autotheory/autofiction
- Archival methodologies
- Feminist theory
- Queer theory
- Affect theory
- Performative writing
- Psychoanalysis and feminism
- Theories and histories of textile, cloth, and clothing
- Critical medical and health humanities
Practice
A practising art writer, Alice contributes regularly to contemporary art and literature publications, with recent criticism appearing in Cabinet, MAP Magazine, frieze, Art Monthly, the art writing anthologies ON CARE and ON FIGURE/S, and exhibition catalogues, through which her writing develops in collaboration with artists and galleries. Recent catalogue essays include long-form feminist texts written for the group show Staying with the Trouble at l’êtrangere gallery (2021) and the two-artist exhibition THROBWERK: Kate Lyddon and Angela Maasalu at Tallinn Art Hall (2019). She also performs and presents her work widely in collaboration with publishers (The Brooklyn Rail, 2022), galleries (MUNCH Museum, 2023–2025, Studio Voltaire, 2017), festivals (Whitstable Biennale, 2016) and museums (Freud Museum, 2019) across the UK and internationally.
Research Funding
2022–3
Terra Foundation for American Art Research Travel Grant: awarded travel grant for a research trip to the US to consult archives for the monograph in development, The Perversions of Textile in Feminist Practice
2021–2
Terra Foundation Centre for American Art Postdoctoral Fellowship: awarded research fellowship to curate and convene an events series on correspondence and letter writing in feminist art, art writing, and art history, alongside related book and long-form article projects, including the academic monograph Close Writing: Kathy Acker, Cookie Mueller, and Love-in-pieces and the edited collection Gestures: A Body of Work
2020–1
Paul Mellon Centre Fellowship: awarded research fellowship to conduct archival work and develop a book project on textiles, perversion, and feminist art and writing practices
2019
AHRC Innovation Placement: awarded research fellowship to work as the University of Manchester’s AHRC Knowledge Transfer Partner, in collaboration with the Freud Museum, London, on a research, writing, and curatorial residency focused on the interrelation of kleptomania, psychoanalysis, and feminist art/writing
2018
Artsmethods@manchester grant: awarded events grant for Gestures: writing that moves between, an interdisciplinary conference on gesture and experimental art writing
2018
Collaborative Skills Development Scheme: awarded collaborative research grant for Gestures: writing that moves between, an interdisciplinary conference on gesture and experimental art writing
2018
North West Consortium Fieldwork and Conference Fund: awarded research grant to conduct archival work and disseminate doctoral research
2016
North West Consortium Student Development Fund Award: awarded research grant to conduct archival work and disseminate doctoral research
2015–8
University of Manchester North West Consortium Doctoral Training Partnership: awarded AHRC doctoral funding for the thesis “Close Writing: Touching Kathy Acker and Cookie Mueller”
Awards
2018
University of Manchester Faculty of Humanities Award for Distinguished Achievement
2015-2018
AHRC North West Consortium Doctoral Training Partnership Award
2015-2018
President Doctoral Scholar Award, University of Manchester
2013
Critical Writing in Art and Design Prize, Royal College of Art
2012
Frieze Writer’s Prize
2011
Art History Prize, University of Sussex
Current and Recent Projects
Close Writing: Kathy Acker, Cookie Mueller, and Love-in-pieces (forthcoming with Duke University Press)
This single-authored scholarly monograph is an interdisciplinary, creative-critical examination of two women writers associated with New York’s Downtown art scene of the 1970s and 1980s, Kathy Acker (1947–1997) and Cookie Mueller (1949–1989). Across theory and practice, the book contributes an original feminist methodology of epistolary writing and love (which it terms ‘close writing’) to revitalise and critically attend to the queer feminist politics of Acker and Mueller’s entangled lives, works, and autofictional archives (publications, images, performances, manuscripts, diaries, letters). Through this framework, the book draws on original archival research to contribute a dialogic ‘correspondence’ with Acker and Mueller’s own interdisciplinary ‘close writing’ of autobiographical disclosure and performance. The book argues that this work shifted the boundaries of sexual desire, the sick body, narratives of illness and love, as well as the line separating art and writing.
Funded by the Terra Foundation for American Art and the AHRC.
Gestures: A Body of Work (forthcoming with Manchester University Press)
Combining creative and critical methods, this cross-disciplinary collection contributes an original feminist investigation of embodied, affective, and political gesture in/as feminist art and writing. It considers and performs how gesture/s and feminism/s have animated one another in feminist and interdisciplinary artistic practices, contributing new theorisations of gesture, gender, sexuality, and embodiment, alongside revised histories of feminist art and literature. The book’s introductory essay “Writing Gesture” argues for a logic of in-betweenness that connects gesture, feminism, and interdisciplinarity. This new articulation of feminist practice is realised in the book’s innovative structure focused on ‘gestural’ stances, which contain transnational readings of artists and writers’ work from the 1960s onwards, as well dialogues between contemporary artists and writers.
Funded by the Paul Mellon Centre, the Terra Foundation for American Art, and the AHRC.
Nylon Stockings and Stolen Things (in development)
Nylon Stockings and Stolen Things: The Minor Intimacies of Cloth in Feminist Practice addresses how sexed, gendered, racialised, and ableist oppressions have marginalised, medicalised, and criminalised the political energies of cloth in women’s lives and works. While feminist art historians have examined legacies of textile art, this book’s archive is ready-made and minor, focusing on intermedia practices where one such cloth object (the nylon stocking) appears. It is a multi-artist study that newly brings together artists and writers working across photography, performance, sculpture, text, textile, and the found object. Through this lens the book develops an original, transdisciplinary, and materially-attentive art writing methodology of cross-historical correspondence and affinity, to examine embodied encounters with found cloth, clothing remains, and nylon stocking forms – their decolonised, ecologically-complex contexts and cross-cultural interactions across time – as represented and performed in US-American feminist and queer art and writing practices of the 1970s–1980s. The book investigates how artists have reinterpreted the importance and force of the nylon stocking – a gendered, sexed, and racialised commodity that emerged with modern capitalism – within women’s embodied, social, and creative lives.
Essays emerging from this research have appeared in MAP magazine, ON FIGURE/S: Drawing After Bellmer, and ON CARE, with a peer-reviewed article on Woodman’s autoeroticism also forthcoming in Gestures: A Body of Work.
Funded by the Paul Mellon Centre, the Terra Foundation for American Art, and the AHRC.
With Professor Gemma Blackshaw, Sick Women: correspondences and performances (2020-ongoing)
“Sick Women” is a collaborative letter writing project that develops a multi-form and multi-disciplinary approach to its embodied, critical, and theoretical investigation of sickness, gender, and cross-historical correspondence and care. Across presentations, performances, readings, experiments, exhibition essay interventions, and a peer-reviewed academic article (“Sick Women Correspondents”, 2022/23), it explores the potential of experimental feminist methodologies to ‘care for’ the ‘sick women’ figures (artists, writers, portrait sitters) of a global art history and visual culture.
Publications, Exhibitions and Other Outcomes
Publications (peer-reviewed)
Butler, A (2026). ‘I wanted the queens to be on the cover of Vogue’: Rooms of friendship, or, Nan Goldin’s fashion dreams. In: Suzanne Ferriss and Anna Backman Rogers, A Century of Women’s Fashion Photography, 1925–Present (chapter article).
Butler, A. and Gemma Blackshaw (2025–26). Flight as Method: A Sick Women Exchange in Material Encounters, and the Time it Takes to Care. In: Fiona Johnstone, Allison Morehead, and Imogen Wiltshire eds., Art and the Critical Medical Humanities. London: Bloomsbury Academic / Critical Interventions in the Medical and Health Humanities (chapter article).
Butler, A (2025–26). Close Writing: Kathy Acker, Cookie Mueller, and Love-in-pieces. Durham: Duke University Press (book).
Butler, A. and Nell Osborne, and Hilary White, eds., (2025). Gestures: A Body of Work. Manchester: Manchester University Press (book).
Butler, A. (2024). Perversions at her Adolescent Fingertips, or, Francesca Woodman’s Autoerotic Attentions: an essay-caress. In: Alice Butler, Nell Osborne, and Hilary White, eds., Gestures: A Body of Work. Manchester: Manchester University Press (chapter article).
Butler, A. (2025). The Perversity of her Envelopes, or, Kathy Acker’s Sick Clothes and Kleptomaniac Close Writing. In: Moran Sheleg ed., Lifework: on the autobiographical impulse in contemporary art, writing, and theory. Manchester: Manchester University Press (chapter article).
Butler, A. and Blackshaw, G (2023). Sick Women Correspondents: Practices of Care in Cross-historical Love Letter Writing. MAI: Feminism & Visual Culture, spring 2023, https://maifeminism.com/sick-women-correspondents-practices-of-care-in-cross-historical-love-letter-writing/ (journal article).
Butler, A. (2021). ‘Have you tried it with three?’ Ann Quin, Love Triangles, and the Affects of Art/writing. Capacious: Journal of Emerging Affect Inquiry 2(3), pp. 82-107 (journal article).
Butler, A. (2019). Fan Letters of Love. In: C. Grant and K. Random Love, eds., Fandom as Methodology: A Sourcebook for Artists and Writers. London: Goldsmiths Press, 2019, pp. 149-164 (chapter article).
Essays and art writing
Butler, A. and Gemma Blackshaw (2025, forthcoming). Close Encounters in the Health Archive of an Aunt, Sister, and Brother: A Sick Women Letter Exchange. In: Allison Morehead ed., Lifeblood. Oslo: Munch Museum.
Butler, A. (2024, forthcoming). Atmospheres of Affinity. In: Martha Jager ed., De Appel: Correspondences 1975–2023. Amsterdam: De Appel, 2024.
Butler, A. (2023). Touching Desire. In: Sticky Fingers Publishing eds., Masturbatory Reader. London: Sticky Fingers Publishing, pp. 69-74.
Butler, A. (2022). Too Likeable: To the Side of Rosemary Mayer, Parts 1 & 2. MAP Magazine, Issue 66, August, https://mapmagazine.co.uk/too-likeable-to-the-side-of-rosemary-mayer-part-1
Butler, A. (2021). Nylon Perversions. In: S. Kivland, K. Macfarlane, and M. Newman, eds., ON FIGURE/S: Drawing After Hans Bellmer. London: MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE / Drawing Room, pp. 24-31.
Butler, A. (2021). Textiles of Trouble, Or, Dropping Threads and Finding New Ones. In: Staying with the Trouble. London: l’êtrangere gallery, https://letrangere.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Alice-Butler-Texiles-of-Trouble.pdf
Butler, A. (2020). Looking and Touching, Desire, Closely. In: S. Kivland and R. Jagoe, eds., ON CARE. London: MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE, 2020, pp. 30-38.
Butler, A. (2019). feel it throb. In: THROBWERK: Kate Lyddon and Angela Maasalu. Tallinn Art Hall, 2019.
Butler, A. (2019). Eleanor Antin on Art, Ageing and Grief. frieze.com, 29 May 2019, https://www.frieze.com/article/eleanor-antin-art-ageing-and-grief
Butler, A. (2019). Stitching Bodies: Mari Katayama’s Handiwork. In: MARI KATAYAMA. London: White Rainbows, 2019.
Butler, A. (2017). With Love, A Letter to Cookie, and her Stories. Cabinet 62, Fall 2016-Winter 2017, pp. 23-33.
Butler A. (2017). Postcards to Performance (about time). In: S. Tomaselli, ed., Gorse 8. Dublin: Gorse, pp. 105-128.
Butler, A. (2017). A Love Letter to a Klepto. In: J. Auman, T. Chadwick, J. Dunn, and D. Jaeckle, eds., Hotel 2. London: Hotel, 2017, pp. 57-66.
Butler, A. (2016). The Peach Slip. In: M. Michalowska, ed., Transition Transformation Transience. London: Wapping Project Commissions, pp.16-23.
Butler, A. (2016). Autobiographical Bodies. Cabinet 58, Spring/Summer 2016, pp. 56-62.
Butler, A. (2015). scrolling the banal babe, in the work of Clunie Reid. Photoworks Annual Issue 22: Women, 2015, pp. 98-107.
Butler, A. (2015). To Ann, Finally: barf, body and writing. In: S. Tomaselli, ed., Gorse 4. Dublin: Gorse, pp. 113-126.
Exhibitions
Butler, A. and H. Bell, A. Gormley, and K. O’Brien. (2024). For Tish: a screening and flash residency-in-response. Stroud Valleys Artspace, Stroud Film Festival, 9 March.
Butler, A. (2016). Fan Letters of Love, Whitstable Biennale.
Conferences and programming
Butler, A. and G. Blackshaw in collaboration with F. Johnstone (Durham), A. Morehead (Queen’s, Canada), and I. Wiltshire (Lincoln). (2024). Art and the Critical Medical Humanities: Confabulations X Health & Care at the RCA, Royal College of Art, 19–21 June 2024.
Butler, A. and H. Bell, A. Gormley, and K. O’Brien. (2024). For Tish: a screening and flash residency-in-response. Stroud Valleys Artspace, Stroud Film Festival, 9 March.
Butler, A. and H. Bell. (2023). Local/Global Communities of Care: Films, Words, and Conversations. Stroud Valleys Artspace, Stroud Film Festival, 9 March.
Butler, A. (2022). Together, With, To: A Workshop on Correspondence and Letters. Centre for American Art, The Courtauld Institute of Art, 16-17 June.
Butler, A. (2021-2022). ‘What a hazard a letter is’: Correspondence in Feminist Art, Art Writing, and Art History. Centre for American Art events series, The Courtauld Institute of Art, London, December 2021-June 2022.
Butler, A. and Blackshaw, G. (2021). Sick Women: The Chronic-poetics of Feminist Art History. College Art Association Annual Conference, 10-13 February [co-convened with Professor Gemma Blackshaw, RCA].
Butler, A. (2019). Stealing Desire: Kleptomania Talks, Freud Museum London, April-July 2019.
Butler, A., and N. Osborne, A. Rouverol, and H. White (2019). Gestures: writing that moves between. Whitworth Art Gallery, University of Manchester, and HOME, 15-16 February.
Recent conference papers and invited talks
Butler, A. and G. Blackshaw (2024). Flight as Method: A Sick Women Exchange. Art and the Critical Medical Humanities: Confabulations X Health & Care at the RCA, Royal College of Art, 19–21 June 2024 [invited presentation].
Butler, A (2024). Scrappy, Witchy, Social Sick, Submerged: Cookie Mueller’s Enchanted Close Writing. In Conversation: Cultures of Enchantment, Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge, 9 May 2024 [invited presentation and panel discussion].
Butler, A. and G. Blackshaw (2023). Sick Women: correspondences and performances. School of Arts and Humanities Insights Forum, Royal College of Art, 19 July 2023 [invited presentation].
Butler, A. (2022). Writing Beside, Outside and Inside: The Reparative Desire of Cookie Mueller’s Crochet Gloves. On: Forms of ‘Outside’ in Art Writing. Experimental Writing in English (1945-2000): The Anti-Canon, Brussels, 15-16 September [invited presentation].
Butler, A. and G. Blackshaw. (2022). To Reply, To Risk, To Resemble: Bessie Bruce and Cookie Mueller. Together, With, To: A Workshop on Correspondence and Letters, The Centre for American Art, The Courtauld Institute of Art, 17 June [invited presentation].
Butler, A. (2022). The Pieces of Cookie Mueller’s Adolescent Reverie (pieces in loving reply). Queer Afterlives in Artist Archives, University of Pittsburgh/Mattress Factory, 15 April [invited presentation].
Butler, A. (2021). Around Valentine’s Day, 1980: Kathy Acker and Cookie Mueller’s Lovesick Letter-pieces. ‘What a hazard a letter is’: Correspondence in Feminist Art, Art Writing, and Art History, The Centre for American Art, The Courtauld Institute of Art, 9 December [research seminar].
Butler, A. (2021). ‘How close can we get to someone? Will we become each other?’ Epistolary Subjects, Objects, and Methods in Feminist Art, Art Writing, and Art History. ‘What a hazard a letter is’: Correspondence in Feminist Art, Art Writing, and Art History, The Centre for American Art, The Courtauld Institute of Art, 9 December [research writing workshop].
Butler, A. and G. Blackshaw. (2021). Correspondence as Care: Writing to Bessie and Cookie. Confabulations: art practice, art history, critical medical humanities, Durham University, 6 October [invited keynote talk].
Butler, A. and G. Blackshaw. (2021). Sick Women: The Chronic-poetics of Feminist Art History, An Epistolary Introduction. College Art Association Annual Conference, 10-13 February [conference presentation].
Butler, A. (2019). Looking and Touching, Desire, Closely. To Write Art, University of Copenhagen, 14-15 November [conference presentation].
Butler, A. (2019). Dear Cookie: A Letter to Your Adolescent Reverie. Modern Language Association International Symposium, Lisbon, 23-25 July [conference presentation].
Butler, A. (2019). Close Writing in Three Acts. Afterlife of the Object Summer School, University of Copenhagen, 18-22 June [conference presentation].
Butler, A. (2019). Touching Desire. Gestures: writing that moves between, Whitworth Art Gallery, University of Manchester and HOME, 15-16 February [conference presentation].
External collaborations and activities
Knowledge exchange
- (2023, 2024) Curator, Stroud Film Festival
- (2019) Writer in Residence, Freud Museum London
- (2019) Conference organiser, Whitworth Art Gallery
- (2015) Writer in Residence, Jerwood Visual Arts / Film and Video Umbrella
Advisory boards and research networks
- (2022–4) Member of advisory committee, ‘Gendered Experiments: Refiguring the Category of “Women’s Experimental Writing”’ led by Dr Kaye Mitchell and Dr Nonia Williams
External examiner roles
- University of Cambridge
- Lancaster University
Mentorship
- Mentor, Scottish Graduate School for Arts & Humanities EDI Mentoring Scheme
Invited speaker
- (2024) Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge
- (2022) The Brooklyn Rail
- (2022) The Courtauld Institute of Art
- (2021) Durham University
- (2021) Drawing Room
- (2017) University of Manchester
- (2017) Studio Voltaire
- (2016) New York University
- (2016) Wapping Project
