Darcy White

Darcy White is Senior Lecturer in Visual Culture at Sheffield Hallam University (SHU) where she teaches the history and theory of photography on undergraduate and postgraduate programmes. White’s research concerns the visual representation of people and places in relation to issues such as class, gender and ethnicity. In recent years this has focussed on questions of social justice and the role played by visual culture in shaping understandings and attitudes to climate and ecological crises.

White has enjoyed a varied career in the visual arts – beginning as a painter and printmaker with a particular interest in landscape. From 1997 she taught art history for the Worker’s Education Association and ran Public and Community Arts Projects. She joined Sheffield Hallam University as a researcher in 2000, working on a sustained project to document the sculpture and monuments of Sheffield and South Yorkshire under the auspices of the Public Monuments and Sculpture Association, as part of their National recording Project. This culminated in a the publication of The Public Sculpture of Sheffield and South Yorkshire, Liverpool University Press (2015) for which she is editor and co-author.

In 2015 White founded the Northern Light Landscape Photography Research Group at SHU and has co-convened international conferences and co-curated related exhibitions. These have resulted in the production of three anthologies in the “Northern Light” series on landscape photography of the north, published by Transcript Verlag, for which she is co-editor and co-author: Northern Light: Landscape, Photography and Evocations of the North, 2018; Proximity and Distance in Northern Landscape Photography: Contemporary Criticism, Curation and Practice, 2020; Disturbed Ecologies: Photography, Geopolitics, and the Northern Landscape in the Era of Environmental Crisis, 2023.

In 2018 White co-founded the Visual Activism Research Group at SHU to investigate contemporary political art and the aesthetic practices of social movements and protest across the globe. She is co-editor and co-author of Visual Activism in the 21st Century: Art, Protest and Resistance in an Uncertain World, Bloomsbury, 2022.