Dr. Gabriel Koureas completed his PhD at Birkbeck, University of London (funded by a three-year grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, AHRC), where he taught from 2000 to 2019 and is now a research fellow. He is also a fellow and associate lecturer at the University of Nicosia.
His research focuses on the memory and representation of war in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in relation to gender, sexuality and nationalisms. He has completed two Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded research projects: ‘Ottoman Pasts, Present Cities: cosmopolitanism and Transcultural Memories’ which resulted in a special issue of the Journal of Memory Studies (2019) and the exhibition ‘East and West: Visualising the Ottoman City’ at Peltz Gallery, Birkbeck. The project ’Terrorist Transgressions: Gendered Representations of the Terrorist’ resulted in a co-edited volume published by IB Tauris (2013) and the exhibition ‘Mangled Metal’ in collaboration with the artist John Timperlake at the Peltz Gallery. His other publications include works on the memory of the First World War, art and the senses, the visual culture of colonial wars of independence, and cross-cultural memories in the Middle East and the Mediterranean in contemporary art. His groundbreaking co-edited volume ‘Contemporary Art from Cyprus’ (2021) provides the first academic study of Cypriot contemporary art. His current research focuses on cross-cultural memories in contemporary art from the Eastern Mediterranean. He is currently co-editing with other Celadon members a journal special issue titled ‘Looking East, Looking West: Repositioning Eastern Mediterranean Art and its Histories from Within’.
He has served as a member of the steering committee of the Centre for Cultural Memory, School of Advanced Studies, University of London, the Centre for Museums and Cultures and the Peltz Gallery, at the School of Arts, Birkbeck. He is currently working as a freelance curator and has recently curated the exhibition ‘Seeing Through Melancholia’ (2023) at the House of Hadjigeorkakis Kornesios in Nicosia. He also co-curated the exhibition ‘UNDER|MINING’ (2022) at various locations in the former mining village of Kalavasos. He is the director of the Celadon Centre for Arts and Ecologies.