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An academic leader with over 40 years’ experience in higher education in UK, Europe and Australasia. Professor Paul Gough is a painter, author and broadcaster who has exhibited his paintings and drawings globally, and has authored over 10 books and 100 research papers on art history and cultural memory.

With extensive experience in higher education research leadership, he served on numerous international boards, research council committees, and education task groups, including chair and panellist for Research Assessment (RAE, REF, PBRF, AHRC) in UK, Europe, Hong Kong and New Zealand. He has considerable experience of leadership roles in South-East Asia.

During ten years work as a television presenter, researcher and associate producer he worked for ITV, BBC and C4 on creative arts programmes including the award-winning documentary Redundant Warrior (the photographer Don McCullin) and ‘Drawing Fire’ (military sketching and panorama drawing). He has a credit for ‘design research’ in Chicken Run (Aardman Animation).

In addition to books on Stanley Spencer, John and Paul Nash, and a recent biography of Gilbert Spencer (published by Yale University Press in 2024) his second book on street artist Banksy was released in 2025. A regular media commentator – BBC, Sky, ABC, C4 – on the street artist, in 2022 a short film alleging Gough was the street artist went viral over TikTok, receiving more than two million views.

After over 40 years in UK and international higher education, he retired in 2025 as Vice-Chancellor of Arts University Bournemouth, and remains a visiting professor at RMIT Australia, and an artist-academician and former chair of the Board at the Royal West of England Academy.

ACADEMIC QUALIFICATIONS

• PhD, Royal College of Art, London, 1991
• MA in Painting, Royal College of Art London, 1985

PROFESSIONAL APPOINTMENTS    

• 2024    Member, RWA Development Committee, Royal West of England Academy
• 2021    Member, Poole Museum Development Board (dissolved 2025)
• 2020    Elected Chair of UKADIA Board representing UK Arts & Design Institutes of Art GuildHE
• 2018    ‘Research Assessment and Impact’ panel member, Aalto University, Helsinki
• 2018    Chair of Board, RMIT Training (controlled entity of RMIT) 2016-18
• 2016    Specialist adviser Research Excellence Framework (REF) for 4 universities in UK
• 2015    Invited member of Expert Working Group for Translating Research for economic and social benefit: country comparisons project, as part of government ‘securing Australia’s Future’ project. One of five academics selected by Australian Council of Learned Academies (ACOLA), 2014 to 2015
• 2015    Invited member of Expert Working Group from Australian Academy of the Humanities to create report ‘Measuring the Value of International Research Collaboration’ commissioned by the Department of Industry and Science
• 2015    International assessment of teaching quality, Higher Education Funding Council (Hefce)
• 2014    Chair, Research Assessment Exercise, Panel Creative Arts, Performing Arts, and Design, Hong Kong University Grants Commission, Hong Kong SAR
• 2014    Chair RMIT Europe Board (controlled entity of RMIT) 2014 -16
• 2013    Panel member, Performance-based Research Fund (PBRF), Art, Design, Creative and Performing Arts, New Zealand
• 2013    Chair of Board for three Innovation networks – iNETs in bio-med, micro-electronics, environmental technologies – that brought together academic researchers with regional industry, businesses and public sector organisations; RDA match funding, 7.4m, three years.
• 2013    Responsibility for Director and staff of the National Co-ordinating Centre for Public Engagement (NCCPE) a UK-facing organisation co-hosted by UWE and the University of Bristol, which sought to share the benefits of higher education and research with the public
• 2008-13

Elected artist member Royal West of England Academy (RWA), Bristol

Member of Council, founding member of Trust Board

Chair of Trustees (resigned upon appointment to position in Australia)

• 2008-12

Member, Council of Management, Arnolfini, Bristol

Member, Bristol Cultural Development Partnership (regular chair at Festival of ideas)

• 2001-08

Member, Art and Design Panel, RAE 2001

Member, AHRC Visual Arts and Media panel

Member AHRC Peer Review College

Member, AHRC Strategic Advisory Group

Member, HEFCE Research Capability Funding panel

Member, RC-UK Academic Fellowships selection panel

Chair, Commissioning Panel, AHRC ‘Landscape and Environment’ research programme

Member, AHRC Programme Decision-making Review Group

Chair, Sub-panel UoA 63 Art and Design, RAE2008

Member, Main Panel 0, RAE 2008

RESEARCH AREAS / FIELDS

• Cultural History
• Commemoration and remembrance
• Street Art

RESEARCH PUBLICATIONS

• Gough P. (2025) Banksy: Cultural Outlaw, Sansom & Company, ISBN 1915670233.
• Gough, P. (2024) Gilbert Spencer: The Life and Work of a Very English Artist, Yale University Press, London, ISBN-13‏: ‎ 978-0300269819
• Gough, P. (2018) Dead Ground. War and Peace: Remembrance and Recovery. A Cultural reading of Memoryscapes from the Great War, 1914-1918, BSP, Melbourne, ISBN: 978-1911408451
• Gough, P. (2017) ‘The Holy Box’: the Genesis of Stanley Spencer’s Sandham Memorial Chapel, Sansom in collaboration with The National Trust and the Stanley Spencer Gallery. ISBN: 978-1911408093.
• Gough, P. (2016) Zawn: Walking West Penwith. Cliff-edge painting by Paul Lewin, Sansom and Company. ISBN: 978-1908326973
• Gough, P. (2015) ‘Back from the Front’: Art, Memory and the Aftermath of War, Bristol Cultural Development Partnership. ISBN: 978-0955074257
• Gough, P. (2014) ‘Brothers in Arms’, John and Paul Nash, and the aftermath of the Great War, Sansom and Company. ISBN: 978-1908326522
• Gough, P. (2012) (ed.) Banksy: the Bristol Legacy, Redcliffe Press, UK. ISBN: 978-1906593964
• Gough, P. (2011) Your loving friend, Stanley: the correspondence between Desmond Chute and Stanley Spencer, Sansom and Company and the Stanley Spencer Gallery, Cookham. ISBN: 1906593760
• Gough, P. (2010) A Terrible Beauty: British Artists and the First World War, Sansom and Company, Bristol, UK. ISBN 978-1906593001
• Gough, P. (2006) Stanley Spencer: Journey to Burghclere, Sansom and Company, UK. ISBN: 978- 904537588

Chapters in books / journal articles (selected)

• Gough, P.J. (2025) David Cotterrell: ‘Shadows & Lies’- The Illusion of Evidence, catalogue essay for exhibition at Danielle Arnaud Gallery, London, 25 January – 1 March 2025.
• Gough, P.J. (2024) ‘Planting the past: garden memorials as theatres of remembrance’,
• The Palgrave Encyclopaedia of Cultural Heritage and Conflict, 2024/25.
• Gough, P.J.  (2021), ‘Representing the Unseen: the primacy of visual testimony in official British war art’, in Celinscak, M. and Hutt, C. (2021) Artistic Representations of Suffering: Rights, Resistance, Recognition, Rowman & Littlefield, USA. pp.71-81.
• Gough, P.J.  (2021), ‘That dastardly plot’: garden as weapon of war and peace, in Afterstorm (eds.) Charles Green, Jon Cattapan, Art and Australia Publishing, Melbourne, June 2021, pp.109-121.
• Gough, P.J.  (2021) That Huge, Haunted Solitude’: 1917–1927 A Spectral Decade. Bulletin of the Auckland Museum, New Zealand, 2021: 5–10.
• Gough, P.J.  (2020) ‘Painting Visions of War and Peace: Stanley Spencer, Henry Lamb and the Salonika Campaign’, in Michael Llewellyn-Smith (ed.), The Macedonian Front 1915-1918: Politics, Society and Culture in time of war.
• Gough, P.J. (2019) Topographies of Remembrance across the former British Empire’ / La Topographie de Souvenir dans l’empire Britannique, in Racine, Michel (ed.) Gardens of Peace / Les Jardins de Paix (Fonds Mercator, Paris, 2019) pp.40-45.
• Gough, P.J.  (2019) ‘Re-membering the Past’; eye-witness and post-battle artistic accounts of the Falklands War’, Martin Kerby, Janet McDonald (eds.) The Palgrave Handbook of Artistic and Cultural Responses to War since 1914: UK, USA and Australasia, Sydney: Palgrave 2019, pp. 371-390.
• Gough, P.J. (2017) ‘A concentrated utterance of total war’ – Paul Nash, CWR Nevinson and the challenge of representation in the Great War, in Joanna Bourke (ed.) War and Art: A Visual History of Modern Conflict, Reaktion Books, November 2017, pp. 270-282. ISBN-10: 1780238460
• Gough, P.J. ‘(2016) Seeking the kingdom of heaven…’ Stanley Spencer (1891-1959) painter, writer, visionary, in Richard Heathcote and Anna Jug (eds.), Stanley Spencer: A Twentieth-Century Master (Wakefield Press, Adelaide, Australia, 2016).
• Gough, P.J. (2016) ‘Filling the Void’: artistic interpretations of the empty battlefield, in Raelene Frances and Bruce Scates (eds.), Beyond Gallipoli: New Perspectives on ANZAC (Australian History Publication, Monash University Publishing, 2016) ISBN 978-1-925495-10-2
• Gough, P.J. (2016) ‘Existencillism’: Banksy and the stencil as radical graphic form, Drawing: Research, Theory and Practice, Vol.1, No.1, pp.97-117.
• Gough, P.J. (2014) ‘Planting Memory’: the Challenge of Remembering the Past on the Somme, Gallipoli and Melbourne, in Garden History, Journal of the Garden History Society, Vol.42, Suppl.1, 2014, pp.3-17

BOOK PUBLICATIONS

Australian Research Council, 2017-19, ‘World pictures’ $310,000 Discovery Grant, with Cattapan, Green & Brown, University of Melbourne / RMIT University

Wikipedia

LinkedIn

Paul Nash in Dorset

A catalogue of the artist’s work, 1933-1946, with essays by PG

Gilbert Spencer