Dr. David Brian Howard received his Ph.D. from the University of British Columbia in Art History in 1993 and also holds degrees both in Canadian History as well as Fine Arts (Painting). He has published numerous book chapters, articles, and reviews on the history, politics, and theory of modernism and postmodernism in the United States and Canada after World War II.  His most recent publication is the essay “From the Missile Gap to the Culture Gap: Modernism in the Fallout from Sputnik,” published in Cultural Studies: An Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell Press, 2008). He has also curated a critical retrospective of the work of the Canadian abstract painter Art McKay.

 His current research examines the complex phenomena  of allegory in European and North American culture, especially in the writings of Charles Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin, and Craig Owens, as a key instrument for cultural and social critique in the twenty-first century.