Dr Robert Kilroy

I received my PhD from Trinity College Dublin for a thesis on the work of the artist Marcel Duchamp and the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. As assistant lecturer at Limerick School of Art and Design (Technological University of the Shannon), I deliver undergrad and postgrad modules on Media Literacy in Art & Design Education. These modules explore how psychoanalytic approaches to art and design give rise to a materially-grounded model of digital literacy, suitable to the challenges posed by AI.

My teaching and research explore the relation between technology, art and contemporary subjectivity by probing what I term the ‘infra-disciplinary’ relation between art history, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. I have published widely in these fields and I am author of Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain: One Hundred Years Later (Palgrave 2017), a theoretical reading of Duchamp’s most famous readymade marking the centenary of the work’s production. My writings have appeared in French, German and Arabic in collective publications alongside contemporary thinkers such as Catherine Malabou, Slavoj Žižek, Jean-Luc Nancy and Alain Badiou (forthcoming), whose work I critically engage with. I am a regular contributor to the International Journal of Žižek Studies (IJŽS) and Lacunae, the English-language journal published by the Association for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy in Ireland (APPI). In 2023, I contributed a chapter to Psychoanalysing the Rise of the Small Screen: The Year the Cinemas Closed (Routledge), exploring the notion of ‘Digital Tectonics and Cinematic Intimacy’ in a post-pandemic age.

Currently, I am preparing an article for publication in a special edition of Turia + Kant on the aesthetic writings of Alain Badiou. In a forthcoming contribution to 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long 19^th Century, I will explore the material link between the daguerreotype and the NFT as the basis for a new model of digital literacy, what I am calling a ‘media post-mortem’. This series of publications, which propose a new theoretical reading of the evolving relationship between art, psychoanalysis and technology, forms of the basis of my next book project, which will focus specifically on the relation between Art, AI and human desire.

My research supervision (PhD, MA) also relates to the fields of art history, aesthetics, curatorial practices and art & design education (within globalist/decolonial paradigms). Between 2020-2023 I was Curator for Modern & Contemporary Art and, subsequently, Head of Collection Studies at the Louvre Museum’s flagship initiative in the Arabian Gulf, the Louvre Abu Dhabi. Since 2017, I have been adjunct lecturer at the Sorbonne University’s Abu Dhabi campus, where I deliver a postgrad module on Aesthetics and Historiography as part of the MA in History of Art & Museum Studies. Since 2023, I have guest lectured on the MA in Art History, Collections and Curating at University College Dublin. I also intervene on the MA in Fine Art at New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD).