Dr Kamini Vellodi

Kamini researches and publishes extensively in the fields of modern and contemporary European philosophy and critical theory, philosophies of art, theories and critical historiographies of art history, contemporary visual arts and theories of the image.

Recent books include Tintoretto’s Difference. Deleuze, Diagrammatics and Art History (Bloomsbury, 2019), which combines philosophical, art historical, art theoretical and art historiographical analysis to problematise questions of time, history, thought and art at the borders of art history. She is co-editor, with Prof Aron Vinegar, of Grey on Grey. At the Threshold of Philosophy and Art, with Aron Vinegar (Edinburgh University Press, 2023) which brings together contributions that theorise the concept of grey, inviting ways to rethink the temporalities, techniques and media of artworks and images.

Kamini is currently working on two books. The Visual World of Deleuze and Guattari. A Heteropaedia, offers a systematic treatment of the visual artists discussed by Deleuze and Guattari, reflecting on the currency of their ideas in relation to questions of the ecological, the inter-speciel, and new media. Kamini is also co-editing, with Prof. Jae Emerling (University of North Carolina, Charlotte) a collection of essays titled Inventions of Theory, with contributors including Mieke Bal, Homi Bhabha, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Georges Didi-Huberman, Tim Ingold, and James Elkins. The book interrogates the function and futures of theory in the humanities, with an orientation towards art history and the theorisation of art and images.

Recent invited lectures and keynotes include: Eikones, Basel; College de France, Paris; UCL; University of California, Berkeley; University of North Caroline, Charlotte; the University of Oslo; Parsons School of Design, New York; Seoul National University and the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai.

Books: Single-Authored

Tintoretto’s Difference. Deleuze, Diagrammatics and Art History. Bloomsbury Academic, 2019.

The Visual Thought of Deleuze and Guattari. A Heteropaedia. Edinburgh University Press, Under contract

Books: Edited

Grey on Grey. At the Threshold of Art History and Philosophy. With Aron Vinegar. Edinburgh University Press, 2023.

Inventing Theory. With Jae Emerling. In preparation.

Articles in Refereed Journals

‘Interstitial Thought’. Journal of Visual Culture. Winter 2024 (forthcoming)

‘Troubling Signs, through art: The Aniconic and the Asignifying’ Semiotica, Winter 2024 (forthcoming)

‘On Concepts and Art History. From World to Planetary.’ Res. Spring 2025. (forthcoming)

‘On the question of a philosophical art history’, Journal of Art Historiography, December 2022.

Critical response. ‘Decolonising art history’, Special issue of Art History, edited by Catherine Grant and Dorothy Price, Volume 43, Issue 1, February 2020.

‘Tintoretto: Cosmic Artisan’, Deleuze Studies, Vol 13, Issue 2, 2019, 207-239.

‘Diagram. Deleuze’s augmentation of a topical notion’. Word and Image 34(4), 2018, 299-309.

‘Unhistorical Art History: The Case of Amico Aspertini’, "Newest Art Wohin geht die jüngste Kunstgeschichte?” Special issue of the Verband österreichischer Kunsthistorikerinnen und Kunsthistoriker, 2018.

‘Tintoretto’s Time’, Art History. Volume 38, Issue 3, June 2015, 414-433.

‘Two Regimes of Fact’, Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, Volume 60, Number 1, 2015, 103-122.

‘Diagrammatic Thought: Two Forms of Constructivism in C.S. Peirce and Gilles Deleuze’, Parrhesia, Spring 2014, 79-95.

Chapters in Books (refereed)

‘Klee’s Grey-Point’, in Vellodi and Vinegar (eds) Grey on Grey. At the Threshold of Art History and Philosophy. EUP. 2023.

‘Commemorating Tintoretto? On anniversaries and scholarship’, in Jacopo Tintoretto: Identity, Practice and Meaning. Eds, Tom Nichols and Marie-Louise Lillywhite, Viella Press, Rome, 2022.

‘Diagrammatic trans-disciplinarity. Thought outside discipline’, in Deleuze, Guattari and the Problem of Transdisciplinarity, ed. Guillame Collett, Bloomsbury, 2019.

‘Thought Beyond Research. A Deleuzian Critique of Artistic Research’. in Aberrant Nuptials. Deleuze and Artistic Research, ed. Paulo d’Assis. Leuven University Press, 2019.

‘Heinrich Von Kleist’, in Deleuze’s Philosophical Lineage Vol II. Eds. Jonathan Roffe and Graham Jones. Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2019.

‘Speculation, Construction, Critique: Notions for Art History’, in Speculative Art Histories. Ed. Sjoerd Van Tuinen. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017.

‘Tintoretto’s Michelangelo. An Artistic Diagram as the a priori of Art History’, in Art History After Deleuze and Guattari, eds. Stephen Zepke and Sjoerd Van Tuinen. Leuven University Press, 2017.

‘Tura’s figure of St Maurilio’, in Laura Marin, Anca Diaconu, eds, Usages de La Figure, Régimes de figuration. Bucharest, University of Bucharest Press, 2017.

Book Reviews (refereed)

‘Two Histories of Art History’. Review of Christopher Wood’s The History of Art History Princeton University Press, 2019 and Eric Michaud’s, The Barbarian Invasions A Genealogy of the History of Art. MIT 2019, Art History, Volume 44, Issue 2, 2021, pp409-416.

‘A Timely Collection? Review of Time in the History of Art. Temporality, Chronology and Anachrony.’ Eds. Keith Moxey and Dan Karlholm. The Journal of Art Historiography. January 2019.

‘An Eel Soup. Review of George Didi-Huberman’s The Surviving Image. Phantoms of Time and Time of Phantoms. Aby Warburg’s History of Art.’ Art History, Volume 41, Issue 5, 2018, pp.992-996.

‘Hallucinating Art History’. Review of Eric Alliez’s The Brain-Eye. New Histories of Modern Painting. Art History. Volume 40, Issue 1, 2017, pp.220-224.

‘Working it Out’. Review of Andrew Benjamin’s ‘Art’s Philosophical Work’. Art History, Volume 39, 2017, Issue 3, pp619-622.

Catalogue Essays (Selected)

‘Transfigured Archetypes. The strange becoming-worlds of Marcelle Hanselaar’. In-And-Out Gallery, London. 2022.

‘Quodlibet’. Alastair Gordon at Aleph Contemporary, London. 2021.

‘Poetics of Obsolescence’. Laurence Noga at Aleph Contemporary, London. 2020.

‘Playtime and Painting’. Sharon Hall, Robert Holyhead, Laurence Noga, Katie Pratt, Gina Medcalf, David Rhodes. ArtHouse 1, London. 2019.

‘Iron: Artefacts and Actions.’ Gordon Munro and Ewan Robertson, Callendar House, Falkirk. 2018.

‘Constructing the Past. On John Murphy’. John Murphy. Of Voyages, of other places. Trondheim Kunstmuseum, Norway. Sept 2013-Jan 2014.

Editorial Board/Committee membership

• 2022 – ongoing Member of UKRI FLF (Future Leaders Fellowship) panel.
• 2021 – ongoing Member of CHEAD (Council for Higher Education in Art & Design) Research Strategy group
• 2019 – ongoing Editorial Board Member of the journal, Art History.
• 2021 – ongoing Deleuze Studies in India.
• 2015 – 2017 Deleuze and Artistic Research (DARE).

Kamini acts as peer reviewer for a number of academic journals and publishers including Art History, The Art Bulletin, the Journal of Art Historiography, Deleuze Studies, Stanford University Press, Princeton University Press, Routledge, OUP, Palgrave and Bloomsbury. She has held a number of external examiner roles in the UK and Europe, and is a Fellow of the HEA