Tate Research | Partnerships

Tate Research Centres

Tate's research remit is broad and encompasses not only art history but also visual culture, technical art history and conservation science, cultural theory and policy, education and museum studies.

Individual projects are initiated in all these subject areas at Tate, and details of the largest of these can be found under Research Projects. In addition, however, the museum aims to stimulate research and fresh thought in wide-ranging or new subject areas, bringing together staff and scholars from different disciplines and collaborating with a number of partner organisations.

Tate has therefore set up several Research Centres to focus attention and energy on areas of particular interest to the museum, or where the museum is uniquely placed to contribute to debates within research communities.

The Centres are:

Professor Nigel Llewellyn, Head of Research

Updated May 2011.

Tate Research Centre: The Art Museum and its Future

Art museums today face many challenges. Like all museums, they need to respond and adapt to the many forces shaping the contemporary world... Read more

Tate Research Centre: British Romantic Art

The Centre aims to promote research on British art from around 1770 to 1850. Tate's collection of British art of the Romantic period, which includes the Turner Bequest, the Oppé collection of watercolours and drawings, and major holdings of the work of William Blake and John Constable, is among the greatest in the world. ... Read more

Tate Research Centre: Creative Communities

Building upon the legacy of the St Ives artist colony in Cornwall, the Centre at Tate St Ives aims to encourage research into the origins, activities and future of creative communities in the Britain and elsewhere... Read more

Tate Research Centre: Surrealism and its Legacies

Surrealism occupies a unique position in the intellectual and cultural history of the twentieth century. Marking a crisis in post-Enlightenment thought, and active in every sphere of creative life, surrealism had enormous influence upon modern culture, and many of its ideas retain a critical force today.... Read more

Tate Research Centre: Rethinking Modernism

The long-contested notion of modernism dominates art-historical accounts of the twentieth century, just as competing definitions of the term are pivotal in the more recent evolution of art historical and critical discourse. Debates around modernism have been at the centre of Tate’s concerns for many years. Read more