Tim Barringer is Paul Mellon Professor of the History of Art. He specializes in the art of Britain and the British Empire since 1700, nineteenth-century American art, and art and music. Following positions at the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Universities of London and Birmingham in Great Britain, he came to Yale in 1998. In 2009, Tim Barringer was Slade Professor at the University of Cambridge. In 2013–14, he held a J. Clawson Mills Fellowship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. In 2019, he delivered the Paul Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery in London. He has held visiting professorships at York and Bristol Universities in the UK.
His books include Reading the Pre-Raphaelites (Yale, 1998), Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain (Yale, 2005) and David Hockney: 82 Portraits and 1 Still Life (Royal Academy, 2016). He is completing a book titled Broken Pastoral: Art and Music in Britain. With co-editors Geoff Quilley and Douglas Fordham, he published Art and the British Empire in 2007. In 2018, a collection of essays, Victorian Jamaica, co-edited with Wayne Modest, was published by Duke University Press. On the Viewing Platform: The Panorama from Canvas to Screen, co-edited with Katie Trumpener, appeared with Yale University Press in 2020. Other co-edited collections of essays include Colonialism and the Object; Frederic Leighton: Antiquity, Renaissance, Modernity; and Writing the Pre-Raphaelites. A forthcoming collection of essays, Taj of the Raj: The Victoria Memorial, will be co-edited with Romita Ray.
Barringer was, with Andrew Wilton, curator of American Sublime: Landscape Painting in the United States, 1825-1880 (London: Tate; Philadelphia, Minneapolis, 2002). With Gillian Forrester and Barbaro Martinez-Ruiz, he curated Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and His Worlds, (Yale, 2007). The accompanying book was awarded the Alfred Barr Prize of the College Art Association. With Alison Smith and Jason Rosenfeld, he curated Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde at Tate Britain, London; National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; Pushkin Museum, Moscow; Mori Arts Center, Toyko, and Palazzo Chiablese, Turin, 2012-13. He was curator of Pastures Green and Dark, Satanic Mills at Princeton University Art Museum and other US venues in 2015–16. In 2018, he was curator, with Elizabeth Kornhauser, of Thomas Cole’s Journey: Atlantic Crossings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Gallery in London. He also worked with a Yale team to curate Picturesque and Sublime: Thomas Cole’s Transatlantic Inheritance at the Thomas Cole Historic Site in Catskill, NY, and in 2019 he curated Unto This Last: Two Hundred Years of John Ruskin with Tara Contractor, Victoria Hepburn Judith Stapleton and Courtney S. Long (Yale Center for British Art and Watts Gallery). In 2019–22, an exhibition co-curated with Victoria Osborne and Martin Ellis, Radical Victorians toured the USA. All these exhibitions were accompanied by publications. He is a member of the curatorial team for Preraffaelliti: Un Rinascimento Moderno / Pre-Raphaelites: A Modern Renaissance, to be presented at the Musei di San Domenico in Forlì (Emilia Romagna, Italy) in 2024.
Tim Barringer has served as advisor or co-advisor for 31 completed Ph.D. dissertations at Yale, served as Director of Undergraduate Studies, Director of Graduate Studies and, for six years until 2021, as Chair of the History of Art Department. He was winner of the Sarai Ribicoff teaching prize in 2004.