Joseph McBrinn MA (Glasgow), PhD (Dublin) was educated and has worked in Ireland, Scotland and France.  He has held teaching positions at the Schools of Art in Dublin and Belfast.  He is an Irish art and design historian and also writes about photography, film, fashion, textiles, craft, architecture and popular culture.  He has lectured widely in Ireland and Britain as well as in Scandinavia, Canada, North America, India and New Zealand.  

He has served as a member of the Executive Committee and Board of Trustees of the Association of Art Historians (AAH) as well as on numerous examining committees and advisory boards in universities and museums.  He has held individual research awards from Irish Research Council for Humanities and Social Sciences, An Chomhairle Éalaíon, Arts Council of Northern Ireland, Irish Georgian Society, Esmé Mitchell Trust and a Wellcome Trust Medical Humanities Small Research Award as well as contributing to collaborative awards from the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Leverhulme Trust.

He has written and lectured extensively on the modern Irish artists S.R. Praeger (1867-1954) and John Luke (1906-1975) and is currently researching a biography of the Irish Cubist painter Evie Hone (1894-1955). His most recent publications reconsider the intersecting histories of masculinity, disability and queer identity in modern art and design.  He currently serves on the Editorial Boards of the peer-reviewed journals The Journal of Modern Craft and Textile: Cloth and Culture and writes regularly for these and other art and design journals. He has written extensively for the Irish art press including Circa and the Irish Arts Review and he currently writes a column for Source: The Photographic Review.