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In September 2010 Paul
Gough took up the post of Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic) at UWE,
Bristol. Before that role, he had university-wide responsibilities as Pro VC for Research and Development (including RAE / REF, research bidding); Business Engagement (including links with industry; enterprise; incubation; science park, Science City); Public Engagement and Community Engagement; Graduate studies, PGR and CPD, Work-Based Learning and the Shell Award Framework. He has executive responsibility for regional relationships, in such areas as HEIF, ECIF, ERDF and has executive oversight of four Institutes - Bristol Robotics Lab (with University of Bristol); Institute for Bio-Sensing Technology; Institute for Sustainability, Health and Environment; Countryside and Community Research Institute (with Hartpury College, Royal Agricultural College and University of Gloucestershire). From 2009-2010 he was acting Director of the UWE professional support service, Research, Business and Innovation (RBI) with some 60 staff. |
As a painter, he has exhibited widely in the UK and abroad, and is represented in the permanent collection of the Imperial War Museum, London, the Canadian War Museum, Ottawa, the National War Memorial, New Zealand. His most recent exhibitions have been in Melbourne, Australia, London, and Wellington, New Zealand.
He is an experienced presenter of conference papers, having addressed conferences in UK, Europe, North America and South-East Asia. His published work covers art history, cultural geography, material culture and recent journal papers have examined the contested memorial spaces of cities in England after World War One, the design of commemorative parks in northern France [supported by Canadian government grants], the rhetoric of peace [for which he was awarded an AHRC grant to examine peace gardens in 2006] and the articulation of organisational memory through landscape design. He completed a monograph on the British painter Stanley Spencer in 2006, and a new book '‘A Terrible Beauty’: British Artists in the First World War' was published in 2010. Over forty research papers and abstracts can be seen in the on-line papers and conferences section of this website.
In ten years as a television presenter, researcher and associate producer he worked for ITV, BBC and C4 on a wide range of programmes from dance to drama, poetry to painting, including the award winning documentary Redundant Warrior, about the photographer Don McCullin. In addition to occasional work on BBC radio, he has a credit for ‘design research’ in the animated feature film, Chicken Run. See: Paul Gough in Broadcasting.
National roles in art and design
Following his membership of the RAE 2001 panel for art and design, Paul Gough was invited in 2005 to be the chair of sub-panel 63 (Art and Design) for RAE 2008. He has undertaken a number of roles with the Arts and Humanities Research Board / Council, including membership of the Peer Review College, panel membership for Visual Arts and Media (2000 - 04) and was a member of the Strategic Advisory Group, which recently drew up the review specification for practice-led research in art, architecture and design. He also serves on the HEFCE Research Capability Funding panel and in 2004 and 2006 was the AHRB/C representative on the RC-UK Academic Fellowships selection panel. In 2004 he was invited (with Bruce Brown) to advise HEFCE on applied research and has since presented papers (with Bruce Brown and Jim Roddis) on typologies of research. He is a trained QAA subject reviewer and institutional facilitator, and served on CHEAD Executive from 1998-2000. In 2006 he was invited (by Stephen Daniels) to be chair of the commissioning panel for the AHRC’s ‘Landscape and Environment’ programme, and has been a member of the Council’s review of programme decision-making since its initiation in 2007.
A past treasurer of the National Association for Fine Art Education he was also co-editor of its journal Drawing Fire and is on the editorial board of the Journal of Visual Arts Practice and other HE journals. He has been a reviewer and manuscript editor for several international journals, including Landscape Research, International Journal of Heritage Studies, and Cultural Studies. In 1997 he became chair of the Public Memorials and Sculpture Association regional archive centre for South-west England supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund, and later Chair of the SW Design Forum, working closely with RDA on various design initiatives. See links.
Research areas
Visual representation and recording of conflict: Addressing the role of artists, photographers and soldier-artists in visualizing warfare, his research has been published in key volumes on the First and Second World War. Facing Armageddon (1996); Paschendaele in Perspective (1997); The World War 1914-1945 (2000). Extensive research into the material traces of war and the codification of militarized landscapes has resulted in a body of work on military sketching for reconnaissance, surveillance and target indication, disseminated through television documentary, conference papers and chapters published by the Imperial War Museum. Work on individual practitioners has resulted in broadcast documentaries on Don McCullin (C4) and a monograph on Stanley Spencer (2006). See: Publications and on-line Papers.
Visual cultures of war, memory, place and identity
This work has developed his doctoral work on the representation of the battlefield, with reference to the negative sublime and the condition of emptiness. He has written extensively on landscapes of trauma and recovery, working in collaboration with several Canadian universities to produce visual and written critiques of national sites of memory. More recent work has examined the role of corporations in managing memory of bodies of employers, work that has been published in International Journal of Heritage Studies, (1998, 2004) and the public history group at Ruskin College (2000, 2001, 2005). He has done further work on the contested territories of memorial sites, focusing on British cities and also North American and northern Europe. Research has been published in Landscape Research (1993, 2000) Journal of Historical Geography (2004), Cultural Geographies (2005) and has been realised through exhibitions of drawings and paintings in Canada (2002) Australia (2004) and London (2006) and New Zealand (2010). See an online Gallery of Paul Gough's work.
Material heritages of war and peace
Recent work has explored the complexity of representing peace, and has focused on the creation and maintenance of peace gardens and trans-national peace parks. An AHRC grant (2005-06) enabled detailed research of the former-GLC peace gardens in central London. See: Places of Peace.
These projects have resulted in site-specific exhibitions and installations (Bristol, 2000, London, 2002) a web-based typology of peace iconography and papers in International Journal of Heritage Studies (2002, 2007) Landscape Research (1996). A historic overview of the commemoration of war and its role in forming national identities is published in the Ashgate Research Companion to Heritage and Identity (2007) and an examination of Britain’s National Memorial Arboretum edited by Hilda Kean, Ruskin College (Palgrave, 2010) and he contributed to Deathscapes: Spaces for Death, Dying, Mourning and Remembrance (Ashgate, 2010).
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