John Potvin

Dr John Potvin is Professor in the Department of Art History at Concordia University, Montreal, where he teaches on the intersections of art, design and fashion. His research explores the relationship between subjectivity, interior design and space as well as the complexities that cut across contemporary and historical art, design and fashion.

His work also addresses the ways the male body, masculinity and male sexualities, in particular, are performed, represented, understood, critically evaluated, memorialized and perceived through various design and visual cultures in Europe since the late 19th century.

In addition to numerous articles, he is the author of Material and Visual Cultures Beyond Male Bonding (2008), Giorgio Armani: Empire of the Senses (2013) and Bachelors of a Different Sort: Queer Aesthetics, Material Culture and the Modern Interior in Britain (2014). He is also editor of The Places and Spaces of Fashion (2009) and the forthcoming Oriental Interiors: Design, Identity, Space (2015) as well as co-editor of both Material Cultures, 1740-1920: The Meanings and Pleasures of Collecting (2010) and Fashion, Interior Design and the Contours of Modern Identity (2010). His current project, Deco Dandy: Modernism, Nationalism and Sexuality in 1920s Paris is the result of his most recent three-year Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Grant and explores the fashion, painting, performance and interior design cultures of the much-neglected interwar dandy.