Ricarda Vidal

I am a specialist in visual culture, a curator and translator. I work at the Department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries, King’s College London teaching cultural theory and history on the MA Culture & Creative Industries and supervising MA dissertations in the field.

My research interests lie in 20th and 21st century visual and literary culture. I have published on urban space, cinematic architecture, the legacy of Modernism and Romanticism, speed, the car and driving as cultural phenomena as well as society’s fascination with death and murder. Recent books include Death and Desire in Car Crash Culture: A Century of Romantic Futurisms (Peter Lang, 2013), The Power of Death: Contemporary Reflections on Death in Western Society (Berghahn, 2014, co-edited with Maria-José Blanco) and Alternative Worlds: Blue-Sky Thinking since 1900 (Peter Lang, 2014, co-edited with Ingo Cornils).

While I’m currently working on an article about the thrills of fast ‘action-cam cycling’ in the city, I am mainly occupied with running the research and exhibition project “Translation Games” (www.translationgames.net), which explores the theory and practice of translation in literature and the arts. This cross-disciplinary project is also informed by my practice as ‘creative curator’ and translator. My curatorial practice has involved several multidisciplinary and trans-European projects like Betting on Shorts, and the bookart project Revolve:R, which I run together with the artist Sam Treadaway.

Since 1998 I have also worked as a freelance translator (German-English) specialising on art writing, art history and history (both within academic and popular science writing). At the moment I am working on a collection of private letters by Jewish refugees during the Third Reich.