Lauren Walden

Dr. Lauren Walden is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in Contemporary Chinese Art at Birmingham City University, UK. Her Phd argued for Surrealist photography as a pivotal vector in the dissemination of non-European iconographies as diverse as Africa, Oceania, Latin America and China, utilising primary sources in French, Spanish and Chinese. Previously, she has been a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Contemporary Chinese Art (Birmingham City University), Research Assistant in Chinese History (University of Leicester), Assistant Lecturer (Coventry Univesity) and Visiting Lecturer (University of Hertfordshire). She has been published in outlets such as Visual Studies, Visual Resources, Visual Anthropology, Photography and Culture and Dada/Surrealism. Her first book Le Surréalisme de Paris à Shanghai was published with the Giacometti Foundation in 2022. An expanded English edition will appear in October 2024 with Hong Kong University Press and she is currently working on her second monograph Surrealism and the People's Republic of China under contract with Routledge. She has also held Research Fellowships at the Centre for Creative Photography, Arizona and the Henry Moore Foundation in Leeds.  

Her core research interests lie in Surrealism, Franco-Chinese cultural exchange, history of photography, cosmopolitanism and global art histories. 

Lauren has taught art-historical survey modules stretching from the renaissance to the present day, contemporary art contextual studies, Chinese contemporary art and is second supervisor to two Phd students in the field of Chinese Contemporary Art. She holds Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA).