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About Bloomsbury Contemporary Aesthetics

Discover New Ways of Thinking about Art and the Everyday

Designed for undergraduates, postgraduates, faculty, and scholars in philosophy, literature, and visual arts, Bloomsbury Contemporary Aesthetics features primary texts, exclusive case studies, a bank of images, a digital-only reference work, Aesthetics and Politics in the Global South, as well as monographs, study aids, and edited collections covering aesthetics across the humanities.

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Conversations in Contemporary Aesthetics: Philosophers in a Live Discussion

Are Taylor Swift’s re-recorded albums distinct works of art? Can I have an aesthetic experience of an itch? Watch philosophers discuss their case studies tackling these questions and more in lively and accessible ways.

Explore the Bloomsbury Contemporary Aesthetics author webinar

About the Content

Case Study Articles
Aesthetics and Politics in the Global South
Primary Texts and Scholarly Monographs
Image Gallery and Video Case Studies

Case Studies

This is a growing collection of case studies exclusively commissioned for Bloomsbury Contemporary Aesthetics. Each centers around a single artwork, everyday item, or experience. The 39 authors write about painting, sculpture, films, art installations, nature, food, theatre, novels, itches, manhole covers, and beards. They cover a vast array of objects and offer alternate ways of interpreting art, creativity, and beauty. These are entertaining, illustrated one-of-a-kind introductions to core aesthetic questions about taste, judgement, and the definition of art.

General Editor: Darren Hudson Hick, Furman University, USA

Click here to read the General Editor’s introduction and explore the cases by theme

Click here to view this collection of case study articles, or scroll below to read about the contributors to this series.

Nelson's Ship in a Bottle (artwork by Yinka Shonibare)

Aesthetics and Politics in the Global South

An essential set of critical readings for understanding the global roots, context, and counterparts of traditional aesthetic theories. It brings together selections from 47 aesthetic and political texts across South East Asia, South Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America in the 20th century. Authors include ground-breaking thinkers, utopianists, and revolutionaries including Rabindranath Tagore, Lu Xun, C.L.R. James, Suzanne Césaire, Claudia Jones, Albert Wendt, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Édouard Glissant.

The collection continues to grow with specially commissioned introductions providing context to the individual texts.

Aimed at students and scholars in philosophy, literary studies, and politics looking to decolonize the aesthetic tradition and expand their knowledge of aesthetics beyond Europe.

Edited by: J. Daniel Elam, The University of Hong Kong

Click here to view this collection of critical and primary sources

Click here to read the General Editor’s introduction

Book cover image for Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism

Primary Texts and Scholarly Monographs

The curated selection of over 100 eBooks cover aesthetics across the humanities, ranging from study guides and teaching aids to research texts and edited collections. Titles include Introducing Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art (Second Edition) and series such as Bloomsbury Aesthetics, Contemporary Aesthetics and Art, Contemporary Thinkers Reframed, and Radical Aesthetics-Radical Art.

In partnership with Broadview Press, Hackett, Princeton University Press, and Yale University Press, the Primary Texts include influential works in philosophical aesthetics by authors such as Mieke Bal, Monroe Beardsley, Nelson Goodman, Jean-Marie Schaeffer, and Francis Edward Sparshott.
Click here to view the Primary Texts collection

Okesa II (artwork by Norman Akers and heather ahtone, 2010)

Image Gallery and Video Case Studies

A collection of 295 images has been carefully selected by a team of philosophers who have identified visuals that can be used to spark class discussions or form the basis of a research paper. Images address issues such as the nature of aesthetic judgement, the status of art, and the place of arts within society.
Click here to view the image gallery

Videos have been created around case studies to provide closer analysis of detail in the objects. Click here to watch the first set of videos accompanying ‘Okesa II: A Case Study in Indigenous Aesthetics as a non-Western Paradigm’ and ‘Katharina Grosse, It Wasn’t Us’.

Click here for a guide to Reading Transcultural Aesthetics through Images

About the Case Study Contributors

heather ahtone is Senior Curator at First Americans Museum (FAM) in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. She examines the intersection between Indigenous cultural knowledge and contemporary art. Working in the Native arts community since 1993, she has curated numerous exhibits, publishes regularly, and continues to seek opportunities to broaden discourse on global contemporary Indigenous arts. She is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation and descended from the Choctaw Nation.
Norman Akers is a Native American (Osage Nation) visual artist who uses visual narrative to explore issues of identity, culture, place, and transformation in his work. His work resides in the permanent collections of museums throughout America, from the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC, to the Heard Museum, in Phoenix, AZ. He received his MFA in Painting from the University of Illinois and teaches in the Department of Visual Art at the University of Kansas.
Paloma Atencia-Linares is Associate Professor at UNED, Madrid. She was previously Permanent Research Fellow at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and Lecturer at the University of Kent, UK. Paloma works on various areas within the philosophy of art but specializes in the philosophy of photography and pictorial arts as well as in the philosophy of fiction and narratives. She is also editor—together with Derek Matravers—of the British Journal of Aesthetics.
Sondra Bacharach is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. Her current aesthetic research interests include authorship, street art, and hair aesthetics, and have appeared in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, The British Journal of Aesthetics and The Monist.
Christopher Bartel is a Professor of Philosophy at Appalachian State University and an Adjunct Research Fellow at Charles Sturt University. His research interests primarily lie within ethics and aesthetics, with a special focus on music and video games. He is the author of Video Games, Violence, and the Ethics of Fantasy: Killing Time (Bloomsbury 2020).
AJ Black is a gamer, sci-fi/fantasy nerd, and humanities professor, not necessarily in that order. With a BA in English from Tennessee State University and PhD in philosophy from the University of Oklahoma (focusing on aesthetics and philosophy of art), Black has decided to write about complaining at fast food restaurants, using comic books in philosophy classes, and what to do about bad sequels to classic genre flicks. The rest of their time is taken up by spoiling their wife and cats.
Elisa Caldarola works on the philosophy of contemporary visual arts, on depiction, and on the meta-ontology of art. Some of her papers have appeared in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Ergo, and Open Philosophy. A former Fulbright scholar, she obtained a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Padua, has conducted research at the Universities of Oxford and Santiago de Compostela, and has held positions at the University of Padua.
Adriana Clavel-Vázquez is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Tilburg University. Her research focuses the role imagination plays in our social interactions and engagement with art, and its consequences for the interaction of ethical and aesthetic values.
Wesley D. Cray is an educator, counselor, consultant, and former philosophy professor. She likes to think about music, stories, gender, nutritionally complete food powder, and the ultimate nature of reality. Her book Philosophy of Comics: An Introduction, co-authored with Sam Cowling, is forthcoming with Bloomsbury Press. She likes to watch horror movies, play videogames, and read comics with her dogs and cats.
E.M. Dadlez has a PhD in Philosophy from Syracuse University and is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Central Oklahoma. Her work is mainly on the philosophy of art and literature, and on topics at the intersection (sometimes, more accurately, the collision) of aesthetics, ethics and epistemology. She is the author of various articles on aesthetics and feminist ethics, as well as What's Hecuba to Him? Fictional Events and Actual Emotions (Penn State Press) and Mirrors to One Another: Emotion and Value in Jane Austen and David Hume (Wiley-Blackwell). She is the editor of Jane Austen’s Emma: Philosophical Perspectives (Oxford University Press).
Saul Fisher is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Associate Provost for Research, Grants, and Academic Initiatives at Mercy College (NY). His research in aesthetics centers on architecture, for which he was awarded a Graham Foundation grant (2009) and on which he has written in, among other venues, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. He also works on topics at the intersections of philosophy of art and the social and behavioral sciences. He is presently Chair of the Diversity Committee of the American Society for Aesthetics.
Johnathan Flowers is a Professorial Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy & Religion at American University. Flowers’ research areas include African American intellectual history, Japanese Aesthetics, American Pragmatism, Philosophy of Disability, and Philosophy of Technology. His current research focuses on the affective ground of experience, identity, and personhood through pragmatism and Japanese aesthetics with a specific emphasis on race, gender, and disability as felt orientations in and towards the world.
Cynthia Freeland is Professor Emerita of Philosophy at the University of Houston. She has published on topics in ancient philosophy, feminist philosophy, film theory, and aesthetics. Her books include Philosophy and Film, co-edited with Thomas Wartenberg (Routledge, 1995), Feminist Interpretations of Aristotle (Penn State, 1998), The Naked and the Undead: Evil and the Appeal of Horror (Westview, 1999), But Is It Art? (Oxford, 2001), and Portraits and Persons (Oxford, 2010). From 2014-2016 she served as president of the American Society for Aesthetics.
Ivan Gaskell is Professor of Cultural History and Museum Studies at the Bard Graduate Center, New York City, USA. He is co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of History and Material Culture (2020).
Theodore Gracyk is the author of a number of books on philosophy of art and music, including On Music (Routledge 2013). He co-edited The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Music (Routledge 2011) and was co-winner of the 2002 Woody Guthrie Prize for I Wanna Be Me: Rock Music and the Politics of Identity (Temple University Press, 2001). He also conducts research on the history of aesthetics and has published on David Hume, Thomas Reid, and Edward Hanslick, among others.
James B. Haile an Associate Professor in the department of Philosophy at The University of Rhode Island. Haile has held a joint appointment in the department of English and is currently jointly appointed in the department of Women and Gender Studies. His first book, The Buck, the Black, and the Existential Hero was published with Northwestern University Press in 2020. In addition to numerous articles on Kendrick Lamar, Ralph Ellison, and Ta-Nehisi Coates (to name a few), Haile recently completed a collection of black speculative short stories.
James R. Hamilton works on aesthetic issues and issues in the philosophy of art at Kansas State University, Manhattan, Kansas, USA. An empirically and formally oriented philosopher, his work is informed by related work in fields like decision theory, formal learning theories, cognitive-neuroscience, -psychology, -anthropology, and -history. He has published entries and articles in various encyclopedias, companions, as well as leading journals in aesthetics. Those can be found at https://ksu.academia.edu/JamesHamilton.
James Harold is Professor of Philosophy at Mount Holyoke College, the author of Dangerous Art: On Moral Criticism of Artworks (Oxford University Press, 2020), and the editor of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Ethics and Art. He is the former Director of the Weissman Center for Leadership and the Liberal Arts. He has published widely in ethics and aesthetics.
Darren Hudson Hick works centrally in the overlap between the philosophy of art and intellectual property law. He is the author of Artistic License: The Philosophical Problems of Copyright & Appropriation (Chicago, 2017) and Introducing Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art (Bloomsbury, 2023), coeditor of The Aesthetics and Ethics of Copying (Bloomsbury, 2016), and General Editor of Bloomsbury Contemporary Aesthetics.
Sherri Irvin is editor of Body Aesthetics (Oxford, 2016) and author of Immaterial: Rules in Contemporary Art (Oxford, 2022). She is Presidential Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oklahoma. Her current work treats the intersection of aesthetic engagement, well-being, and justice.
Lisa Jones is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Philosophy at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, where she works in the philosophies of art and literature. Her research has ranged across issues within these fields, including the nature and value of fiction and narrative, the aesthetics and ethics of appropriation art, and – most recently – the artistic aspects of pro wrestling.
Jennifer Judkins is newly retired from UCLA, where she was Adjunct Professor and Faculty Graduate Advisor for Performance in the School of Music. Currently, she is a Trustee for the American Society for Aesthetics. In the musical world, she was a freelance percussionist for many years, performing with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and New Music Group, and the Los Angeles Baroque Orchestra, among other ensembles. Recent publishing includes a co-edited collected volume, Philosophical Perspectives on Ruins, Monuments, and Memorials (Routledge), with Jeanette Bicknell and Carolyn Korsmeyer.
Alex King is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Simon Fraser University. She works in ethics, metaethics, and aesthetics. She runs the aesthetics and philosophy of art website Aesthetics for Birds and is the author of the book What We Ought and What We Can (Routledge, 2019).
Carolyn Korsmeyer is Research Professor of Philosophy at the University at Buffalo and a past president of the American Society for Aesthetics. Her research in aesthetics focuses on emotional and sensory experience. Her books on these subjects include Making Sense of Taste: Food and Philosophy; Savoring Disgust: the Foul and the Fair in Aesthetics; and Things: In Touch with the Past.
Jason Leddington is a Swedish-American philosopher and Associate Professor at Bucknell University. He writes on perception (mainly on hearing and sound) and issues in aesthetics and philosophy of art (mainly on magic and other arts of impossibility, but also on music). In his spare time, he climbs rocks with his wife and (sometimes) does card tricks.
Dominic McIver Lopes FRSC loves teaching philosophy at the University of British Columbia. He also loves writing philosophy, and has put out books on images and their value, new artistic technologies, the nature and value of art, and all aspects aesthetic life and why they matter to us. His work has been supported by the Guggenheim Foundation, the Leverhulme Trust, and the Killam Trust through the Canada Council.
Jennifer A. McMahon is Professor in Philosophy at the University of Adelaide, Australia. She has authored monographs Art and Ethics in a Material World (Routledge 2014) and Aesthetics and Material Beauty (Routledge 2007); edited Social Aesthetics and Moral Judgment (Routledge 2018); and edited special journal issues in Curator: The Museum Journal (62/1, 2019); and the Australasian Philosophical Review (March 2017). Her most recent reference article is “Beauty” in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, 2020.
Hans Maes is Senior Lecturer in History and Philosophy of Art at the University of Kent, UK. He has authored and edited a number of books, including: Portraits and Philosophy (Routledge, 2020), Conversations on Art and Aesthetics (Oxford University Press, 2017), and Pornographic Art and The Aesthetics of Pornography (Palgrave MacMillan, 2013).
Eva Man is currently the Director of Film Academy and Chair Professor in Humanities of Hong Kong Baptist University. She publishes widely in comparative aesthetics, comparative philosophy, woman studies, feminist philosophy, cultural studies, art and cultural criticism. She was a Fulbright scholar and was named AMUW Woman Chair of Marquette University in the US. She contributes public services to the Hong Kong Arts Development Council, Hong Kong Museums Advisory Committee, and Hong Kong Public Libraries.
Erich Hatala Matthes is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Wellesley college. His primary research interests concern the ethics, politics, and aesthetics of cultural heritage, art, and the environment. He has published papers on topics such as art repatriation, historic preservation, landscape art, cultural appropriation, irreplaceability, authenticity, place-loss due to climate change, and the ethics of protecting cultural heritage during armed conflict. His first book, Drawing the Line: What to Do with the Work of Immoral Artists from Museums to the Movies, was published by Oxford University Press in 2022.
Brandon Polite is Associate Professor and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Knox College in Galesburg, IL. He is also host of the YouTube series, Polite Conversations: Philosophers Discussing Art, which includes a miniseries on Taylor Swift's re-recordings. He will serve as editor of the (tentatively titled) essay collection Taylor Swift and the Philosophy of Re-recording: The Art of Taylor’s Versions, which will be published by Bloomsbury and is targeted for a late 2024 release.
Henry John Pratt is an Associate Professor of philosophy at Marist College. He received his B.A. in English and philosophy from the University of Vermont (1995) and his Ph.D. in philosophy from the Ohio State University (2005). Within aesthetics and the philosophy of art, his main research interests include artistic value, popular art forms such as comics and film, narrative, and beards.
Yuriko Saito is Professor Emerita of Philosophy at the Rhode Island School of Design, USA, and Editor of Contemporary Aesthetics. Her works on everyday aesthetics, Japanese aesthetics, and environmental aesthetics appeared in numerous journals, anthologies, and encyclopaedias, and she lectured widely on these issues. She published three monographs: Everyday Aesthetics (Oxford, 2008), Aesthetics of the Familiar: Everyday Life and World-Making (Oxford, 2017, awarded the outstanding monograph prize from the American Society for Aesthetics), and Aesthetics of Care: Practice in Everyday Life (Bloomsbury, 2022).
Elizabeth Scarbrough (she/they) is an associate teaching professor at Florida International University. Their research focuses on the beauty of immovable cultural heritage (such as ruins), published in academic journals and book chapters, as well as in public-facing work. Scarbrough's interest in the preservation of immovable cultural heritage has given rise to a related interest in the ethics of travel and tourism, most recently publishing on the topic in Explorations in Archaeology and Philosophy (2021). Their recent work also includes the ethics and aesthetics of racist monuments, perfume and memory, cinematic experience, and tourism and gender. Visit ElizabethScarbrough.com for more information.
Laura Sizer is Professor of Philosophy at Hampshire College and Visiting Professor of Philosophy at Mount Holyoke College in the United States. She writes on a broad range of topics in aesthetics, affect, cognitive science, and philosophy of mind. Among other works she has authored “The Art of Tattoos” in The British Journal of Aesthetics and “Sad Songs Say So Much: the Paradoxical Pleasures of Sad Music” in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism.
Brian Soucek is Professor of Law and Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of California, Davis, where he teaches constitutional law, art law, antidiscrimination law, and civil procedure. He received his PhD in Philosophy from Columbia University and his JD from Yale Law School. His articles and essays, including work at the intersection of law and aesthetics, are available at https://law.ucdavis.edu/faculty/soucek/.
Robert Stecker is the author of many books and journal articles on aesthetics and the philosophy of art. His most recent book is Intersections of Value: Art, Nature and the Everyday, Oxford University Press.
Deborah Tollefsen is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Memphis. Her teaching and research interests include philosophy of mind, social epistemology, and aesthetics. Her book Groups as Agents was published by Polity Press in 2015.
Saam Trivedi is Professor of Philosophy at Brooklyn College & the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Imagination, Music, and the Emotions: A Philosophical Study (2017), and many articles.
Mary Beth Willard is a professor of philosophy at Weber State University. She writes about art, morality, and immoral artists.