Carol Mavor is Professor Emeritus of Art History and Visual Culture at the University of Manchester. As a writer who takes creative risks in form (literary and experimental) and political risks in content (sexuality, racial hatred, child-loving and the maternal), she has published widely on photography, cinema, colour and childhood. All her books, including Blue Mythologies: Reflections on a Colour (Reaktion, 2013), are richly illustrated with an eye on design. Her most recent monograph, Aurelia: Art and Literature through the Mouth of the Fairy Tale (Reaktion, 2017), is splashed with plenty of aurelian gold metallic ink and is perhaps the most beautiful of Mavor’s publications: indeed, it is an ‘artist’s book’.

She is a kissing cousin of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Susan Stewart, in her attention to touch and affect, in her sensitivity to her own emotions and sense perceptions in her apprehension of art. So, for an art historian in particular, her work is singular, unusually labile, sensuous, associative, and almost disturbingly intense.

—Emma Wilson, Critical Quarterly