Dr Marko Ilić

Marko Ilić is an art historian specialising in recent and contemporary art, with a particular emphasis on their social, political and institutional contexts. His research interests span across the histories of multiple modernisms and modernities, global histories of curating and exhibition making, and transnational networks of artistic collaboration and exchange. 

In 2021, Marko published A Slow Burning Fire: The Rise of the New Art Practice in Yugoslavia with MIT Press. The monograph examines the work of some of the most significant artists of the late twentieth century in relation to the processes that steered the country’s disintegration in the 1990s. While primarily focused on the 1960s to 1980s, it connects Yugoslavia’s alternative art scenes to contemporary discussions about art’s relationship to globalising capital, proposing that the country’s fate should be read as a warning for conflicts brewing on a planetary scale today. Since its publication, the book has been reviewed in several respected journals, including Art in America. You can listen to Marko discussing the book in this episode of the MIT Press Podcast recorded to accompany its launch. 

In addition to the monograph, Marko’s writing has appeared in journals including Third Text and ArtMargins, as well as in edited volumes and museum catalogues. He is currently working on two major projects: a co-edited volume surveying the intersections between contemporary art and populism, and a monograph that will examine the complex and often contradictory roles that art is called upon to serve in post-conflict and transitional settings.

Marko earned his undergraduate degree from the University of Cambridge and his MA and PhD from The Courtauld Institute of Art. Before joining the Department in 2023, he was a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at University College London and lectured at The Courtauld, Newcastle University, and the Universities of Cambridge and York.