Professor, Department of Art History, Concordia University
Dr John Potvin is Professor in the Department of Art History at Concordia University, Montreal, where he teaches on the intersections of art, design and fashion. He is the author of Material and Visual Cultures Beyond Male Bonding(2008), Giorgio Armani: Empire of the Senses (2013) and, more recently, Bachelors of a Different Sort: Queer Aesthetics, Material Culture and the Modern Interior in Britain(2014), winner of the Historians of British Art Book Prize. In addition to being editor of The Places and Spaces of Fashion (2009) and Oriental Interiors: Design, Identity, Space (2015) he is also co-editor of both Material Cultures, 1740-1920: The Meanings and Pleasures of Collecting (2009) and Fashion, Interior Design and the Contours of Modern Identity(2010).He serves on the editorial and advisory boards of several international peer-reviewed journals and is Associate Editor of the Journal of Design History. His current book, Deco Dandy: Designing Masculinityin 1920s Paris (Manchester University Press, 2020) explores the fashion, painting, performance and design cultures of the much-neglected interwar dandy and in 2016 he was awarded a four-year SSHRC Grant to explore ‘Sexuality, Masculinity and Shame in Interior Design: From Professionalization to Queer Theory, 1869-2015’.