Senior Research Fellow
Muybridge; early film history; history of photography, early cinema and popular culture; early television; Victorian optical entertainments.
Former head of the technical department at the British Film Institute (BFI) and a member of the curatorial team, Museum of the Moving Image, South Bank, London, Stephen Herbert is an independent publisher, researcher and curator and world specialist on the Eadweard Muybridge Bequest at Kingston Museum. Author of Industry, Liberty and a Vision: Wordsworth Donisthorpe's Kinesigraph (1998) and Theodore Brown's Magic Pictures: The Art and Inventions of a Multi-Media Pioneer (1997), his edited works include Eadweard Muybridge: The Kingston Museum Bequest (2004) with essays by Stephen Herbert, Marta Braun, Paul Hill and Anne McCormack; A History of Pre-Cinema, 3 vols. (Routledge, 2000); A History of Early Film 3 vols. (Routledge, 2000) and A History of Early Television (3 vols. (Routledge, 2004).
Stephen Herbert is a Senior Research Fellow in the Visual and Material Culture Research Centre at Kingston University and has a long standing relationship with Kingston Museum and Art Gallery through his ground breaking research on Eadweard Muybridge. He was a participant in the International Research Seminar on Muybridge held at the Stanley Picker Gallery on 27 February 2007. This event marked the launch of ‘Muybridge in Kingston’, a new collaborative research initiative between Kingston University and the Royal Borough of Kingston Museum and Heritage Service to work towards broadening access to this world-class collection through a programme of innovative research projects including special exhibitions, publications, web-resources, conferences, symposia and other public events. Stephen Herbert was research advisor on the co-partnered AHRC Muybridge Portal Project, World Wide Collections: Defining Modernities, launched at the BFI in May 2010: http://www.eadweardmuybridge.co.uk/
Stephen has also contributed to the development of the ‘Muybridge Revolutions’ exhibition at Kingston Museum, 19 September 2010 to 12 February 2011, supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund. The Kingston exhibition accompanies the first major UK retrospective of Muybridge's work at Tate Britain. For further information on ‘Muybridge in Kingston’ see: http://www.muybridgeinkingston.com/