Thatcher, J. (2021) The Lives of the Interview: The Development of the Artist Interview in Twentieth-Century Britain and the United States. PhD thesis. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh.

Thatcher transforms the artist interview from a transparent vessel of biographical information into an object with its own material and institutional biography. Interviews are performative and co-constructed encounters that continue to change after the conversation ends: recordings become transcripts, transcripts are edited, excerpts circulate in print or broadcast, and later repetitions alter both the artist’s position and the interviewer’s questions. Her diachronic method is particularly powerful because it refuses the fantasy of a definitive statement. An artist can revise, contradict or reframe earlier positions, while the same interview can acquire new authority through publication, citation and archival preservation. Thatcher’s emphasis on production chains—interviewer, artist, producer, editor, transcriber, publisher, broadcaster—also relocates authorship from a dyad to a network. The work bridges oral history, media archaeology and art historiography, showing that evidence about artistic life is inseparable from the technical forms and institutional passages through which speech becomes record.