Dr Tom Wilkinson

Overview

Biography

Tom Wilkinson is a writer and historian specialising in modern and contemporary architecture and the visual culture of modern Germany. 

Tom is currently a Lecturer at Birkbeck, University of London, and at the Courtauld Institute of Art. He was previously a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Warburg Institute and has a PhD in the History of Art from University College London.

He is also the History Editor of the Architectural Review, where he has worked since 2012. He has written for the Guardian, Domus, Tribune, Apollo, and the Architect’s Journal, among others, and his first book, Bricks and Mortals: Ten Great Buildings and the People They Made was published by Bloomsbury in 2014. He is co-director of New Architecture Writers, a programme for young Black and ethnic minority design critics that he co-founded in 2017.

Tom has organised lecture series at the Warburg Institute, the Soane Museum, and the Royal Academy, where he also co-curated an exhibition titled Futures Found: The Real and Imagined Cityscapes of Postwar Britain in 2017.

Research

Research overview

Tom Wilkinson specialises in modern architecture, the visual culture of twentieth century Germany, media and critical theory.

He is currently working on a project titled Image Economies: Visual Networks and Capital in Modern Germany. This focuses on three exemplary forms of circulating visual matter – emergency money issued during the inflation of 1914-1923, postcards, and satirical prints – investigating their intertwinement with capital flows.

Tom’s doctoral project examined the political implications of architectural history’s engagements with new media, looking at how film, radio and photobooks were used to present the buildings of the past to contemporary audiences in the Weimar period.

He is also working on queer space in film, particularly west German cinema of the postwar period, and on abject spaces such as servants’ rooms, dumps and sewers.