Dr Lindsay Polly Crisp

Lindsay Polly Crisp is Senior Lecturer (Staff Tutor) in Art History at the Open University and Deputy Director of Teaching (Tuition) in the School of Arts and Humanities. Her work straddles art history and cultural studies, visual cultures and contemporary art. She holds a PhD in Cultural Studies from Goldsmiths, University of London, an MA (Dist) in Cultural and Media Studies from the Open University and is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. She is a trained community arts practitioner and began her career as a drama facilitator and mental health support worker before joining the Open University.

Research

Lindsay's research interests relate to materiality, mediality and contemporary art. She has published on the fragment, destruction, and the impunity of matter, embodied practice, process-based art, and the ways we keep hold of and let go of our stuff, and is currently developing a project on fragmentation that uses assemblage theory and new media theory perspectives to explore intersections between material objects and processes, art and visual cultures, and concepts relating to ecology, social justice, and mutuality.

Lindsay co-convenes the Open Ecologies research group, which holds regular seminars bringing together colleagues from the Arts and Humanities, STEM, the Social Sciences and beyond to generate vibrant, cross-disciplinary discussion on ecology, nature, and the climate crisis. She is also active in the Objects, Collections and Museums research group, which provides an interdisciplinary space to explore material objects and their critical reception, and practices of collection and display.

Teaching

Lindsay is contributing to the new postgraduate dissertation module A846: MA Art History Part 2 as an author on the subject of academic writing in art history. On A236: Art and Visual Cultures in the Modern World, she authored two chapters (see ‘Teaching materials’) that explore art history and visual culture in innovative ways. The first, 'The Expansion of Vision', examines how scientific images and new visual technologies have transformed visual culture in modernity. The second, 'The Private Life of Images', explores the image and its ambiguous relationship to private and public life, through examples ranging from daguerreotype portraits to snapshots and the mobile phone camera. She has since served as a Module Team member.

Between 2020 and 2025, Lindsay held the role of Qualification Lead in Art History, with responsibility for supporting the development and review of the BA (Honours) in Art History and Visual Cultures (R27) and the MA in Art History (F33), directing a cohesive teaching programme that fosters students’ development of relevant knowledge and skills through an expanded curriculum that encompasses art history, visual cultures, heritage and museum studies, and global and ecological perspectives across three entirely new art history modules (in addition to an existing module) at levels 2 and 3.

She designed and coordinated a programme of supra-curricular skills development via a suite of online teaching resources complements the new curriculum, enabling art history students to develop their analytic and visual skills throughout their studies. In addition, she adapted, and contributed new sections to, a Visual Analysis Toolkit designed for use by students at all levels (see ‘Teaching materials’). In 2025 she established a programme of art history lectures, delivered live and online for students and colleagues, and instituted regular ‘turn up and write’ sessions, aimed at students from across art history modules.

In support of innovative and inclusive teaching at the Open University Lindsay regularly contributes to scholarship projects. In 2019-20 she sponsored a project lead by Dr Veronica Davies to investigate strategies for effective online 'gallery visits', and in 2019, she was lead researcher for the arts strand of a mixed methods, cross-School scholarship project to investigate the pedagogic implications of synchronous, online teaching within the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences particularly in relation to issues of equalities and access.

Conference papers

June 2024: 'Contacting Nature Through Ekphrasis', Creative Interactions and Contemporary Challenges Conference, The Open University, London.

April 2023: 'Fragmenting', Objects, Collections and Museums Research Group, The Open University.

November 2022: 'Assemblages and Ecologies', Open Ecologies Research Group, The Open University.

June 2019: ‘The manual in Michael Landy’s Break Down’: Languages INTER Networks conference. Lancaster University.

September 2017: ‘Fragment / Part / Whole: Matter and Mediality in Michael Landy’s Break Down’. Waste: A Symposium. Birkbeck, University of London.

January 2017: 'Michael Landy’s Break Down: Trashing and Transforming’, TRASH conference, Department of English Studies, University of Vienna. Supported via a grant from the competitive Graduate School Fund at Goldsmiths, University of London.

October 2016: ‘Writing through the fragments: Ekphrastic encounters with Michael Landy’s Break Down’. Creative Humanities: Thinking, Making and Meaning. AHRC North West Consortium Doctoral Training Partnership, Royal Northern College of Music, Manchester. Supported via a full bursary from the Consortium.

Invited speaker

November 2022: Chair of Seminar, Ekphrasis, Creating a Space for Art and Literature, Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Studies, University of London.​​

January 2020: ‘Material, process, time: The fragment in Michael Landy’s Break Down’: Literary London Reading Group. University College London.

Public Engagement

September 2024: Contributed research and questions on ecology, communality and the university to a podcast interview conducted by Dr Urmila Mohan with the world-renowned anthropologist Professor Francis B. Nyamnjoh. 'Convivial Scholarship in an Incomplete World', Embodied Worlds Season 2, Episode 1, The Jugaad Project (transcript published via The Jugaad Project).

June 2023: Ekphrastic writing activity to promote close observation and ecological awareness at a land art site, for community members and approximately 85 local school pupils aged 13-15. Solstice Week. Crawick Multiverse, Sanquhar, Dumfries and Galloway.

June 2022: Co-facilitated creative activity about endangered birds and their habitats for families and children (approximately 400 visitors), as part of the Art, Visual Culture, and the Global Climate Crisis project. ‘Wildlife: Creative Encounters with Urban Nature’, Glasgow Science Festival. Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow.

Teaching materials

Crisp, L. P. (2023a) ‘The expansion of vision’, in Murray, A. (ed.), Visual cultures of modernity [text book chapter, A236], The Open University, pp. 43-74.

Crisp, L. P. (2023b) ‘The private life of images’, in Murray, A. (ed.), Visual cultures of modernity [text book chapter, A236], The Open University, pp. 111-44.

Crisp, L. P. (2025) ‘Moving images’, Visual Analysis Toolkit [study skills resource], The Open University

Crisp, L.P and Kemp, A. (2025) ‘Words and Images’ Visual Analysis Toolkit [study skills resource], The Open University

Crisp, L. P. and Shaw, S. (2023) ‘Photographs’, Visual Analysis Toolkit [study skills resource], The Open University.