Dr. Tyler Denmead is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge. He also serves as a Fellow and Director of Studies of Education at Queens’ College.
Denmead researches and writes about youth, arts, culture, and race, with a particular focus on whiteness. His educational inquiry crosses several fields, including visual art education, art history, cultural studies, and critical race and ethnic studies, and is informed by his prior work as a community-based arts educator and occasional artist/performer. He is the founding executive director of New Urban Arts in Providence, Rhode Island, USA.
His book, The Creative Underclass: Youth, Race, and the Gentrifying City (Duke University Press, 2019) is an ethnographic examination of how youth creatively and culturally respond to racialising discourses of “troubled youth” that have been central to state-led creative urban gentrification schemes. His current book project is a critical examination of anti-racist reading practices, with a particular focus on a 2021 British legal case in which a White nationalist, convicted of possessing information useful to plotting a terrorist attack, was sentenced to reading canonical English literature.
He welcomes applications from doctoral students working in Education across a variety of disciplines and theoretical concerns, including: American Studies; Critical Youth Studies; Cultural Studies; British Cultural Studies; Critical Race and Ethnicity Studies; Critical Race Theory, particularly Critical Whiteness Studies; Black Feminisms, and Artistic, literary, ethnographic, and cultural methods of analysis.
Students in his doctoral research group study British Muslim women’s lived experiences and biopower; international Chinese students and Anti-Asian racism at American universities; decolonising the Ghanaian visual art curriculum; textile as practice-based research; spacemaking by Black British women in elite British universities; Indian Classical Dance and Hindutva, and gendered racialization in the English Language Teaching industry in China. Prior doctoral students have studied social art practice and have written fiction as a dissertation.
He has been the recipient of several fellowships and awards, including from the Leverhulme Trust, the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, the Echoing Green Foundation, and the Society of Royce Fellows. In 2019, students at Cambridge voted him the Best Lecturer at the University of Cambridge.
He holds a master’s degree and doctorate (Education) from Cambridge and received his bachelor’s degree (History of Art and Architecture) from Brown University.
