Richard J. Williams (Washington D. C., 1967) is Professor of Contemporary Visual Cultures at Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh, where he has worked since 2000. He studied at the universities of London and Manchester and previously taught at Liverpool John Moores University. He has served as Head of the School of History of Art at Edinburgh and is currently Director of Internationalisation at Edinburgh College of Art.
His research focuses on architecture, urbanism, and the visual culture of the contemporary city, with particular interests in urban representation, modern ruins, museums, and the adaptive reuse of infrastructure.
He is the author of numerous books, including After Modern Sculpture (2000), The Anxious City (2004), Brazil: Modern Architectures in History (2009), Sex and Buildings (2013), Why Cities Look the Way They Do (2019), Reyner Banham Revisited (2021), and The Culture Factory (2021). His most recent book, The Expressway World (2025), examines the relationship between cities and the urban expressways built during the second half of the twentieth century.
