Derek Conrad Murray is an interdisciplinary theorist specializing in the history, theory and criticism of contemporary art, postcolonial, globalization, and cultural theories, identity and representation, and the methodologies and ethics of art history and visual studies. He has contributed to leading magazines and journals of contemporary art such as Art in America, Parachute, Art Journal, Exit EXPRESS, the Documenta 12 Magazine Project, Public Art Review, Third Text and Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art (Duke University Press), where he currently serves as Associate Editor. Murray’s current research explores the interrelatedness of global politics, capitalism and the historiography of contemporary artistic production. In the last decade, the art world has experienced an increased internationalism. This shift has influenced the traditional theoretical and methodological practices of mainstream art history. As a result, the academy has seen a reinvigorated scholarly interest in non-Western modernities and transnational identities—and a greater engagement with intellectual concerns related to migrancy, exile and Diaspora in terms of their interconnectedness to the ever-shifting nature of art production in the post-colonial era. His research is concerned with how this bourgeoning internationalism has been instrumental in the formation of a new geographically de-centered and pluralist art discourse, achieved through international as opposed to localized groupings of artists. Murray’s research unpacks these debates through an analysis of international exhibitions, their criticalities, and the participating artists’ creative output. In a parallel inquiry, Murray investigates the importance that identity has played in the aesthetic and intellectual practices of American art history from the nineteenth century to the present—examining the methodologies of the discipline through a specified engagement with seminal periods, from early American painting to contemporary artistic practices. While acknowledging that ‘art and politics’ have consistently been a crucial theoretical problem within orthodox art history, Murray examines the effects of socio-political realities upon pictorial practice.