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Professor Helen Hills
Professor Emerita

Biography

Helen Hills is Professor Emerita of Architectural and Art History in the Department of History of Art at the University of York.

Her research interests include the inter-relationships between early modern colonialism and high-end art and culture; baroque theory; architectural history and theory; architecture and feminism; inter-relationships amongst art, religious devotion, social class, gender and sexuality; Naples and the Italian South; affect and art; monastic architecture; architecture and the veil; materiality and miracles; post-industrial cities and urbanism.

Education and career

Helen Hills studied Modern History at the University of Oxford before turning to History of Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London (MA with Distinction) where she also did her PhD. Her doctorate study of inlaid marble decoration in Sicily later became her first book, Marmi Mischi Siciliani: Invenzione e Identità (Società Messinese di Storia Patria, 1999), the basis of a trajectory which includes over 70 articles and nine books, of which the most recent are Silver: Transformational Matter (Oxford University Press, 2023) and The Matter of Miracles: Neapolitan Architecture and Sanctity (Manchester University Press, 2016). Hills has a contract with MIT Press for her next book which explores the double helix of coloniality and visual culture under the Spanish imperium on both sides of the Atlantic.

Helen Hills’ first job was with ‘Zuriya’, a brilliant experimental African Theatre Company in South London. Since then, she has taught at Queen's University in Canada (for nine months while completing her PhD), the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA and the University of Manchester, UK, before joining the History of Art Department at York (Anniversary Reader in 2005promoted to Professor in 2008). She was the first ever woman professor of Art History at the University of York.

Recent awards

2022 British Academy Conference Publication Award  for ‘The Matter of Silver: Trauma, Surface, Substance, Shimmer’, ed. H Hills

2021 British Academy Conference Award for ‘The Matter of Silver: Trauma, Surface, Substance, Shimmer’

2018-19 Leverhulme Research Fellowship for Silver: Surface and Substance

2017 Senior Visiting Fellow at Villa I Tatti, The Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, Autumn 2017

Academic profile

Helen Hills has published extensively in the field of architectural history and theory, baroque art and theory, gender and sexuality, and contemporary visual culture, including three scholarly monographs, six edited books and journal special issues, and numerous chapters and articles. Her current book project on silver is with MIT Press.

The Matter of Miracles: Neapolitan Baroque Architecture and Sanctity was published by Manchester UP in 2016. Invisible City: The Architecture of Devotion in Seventeenth-Century Neapolitan Convents (Oxford University Press, 2004) was awarded the Best Book Prize in 2004 by the USA Society for the Study of Early Modern Women.

Rethinking the Baroque (Ashgate, 2011) offers essays by leading scholars from art history, philosophy, and literature studies to reconsider the potential of ‘baroque’; New Approaches to Naples (2013) offers a range of ways to come across Naples outside the usual paradigms formed elsewhere.

Hills founded and organized the Neapolitan Network, an exchange and meeting point for scholars of Neapolitan culture (traditionally neglected in the humanities) from all over the world which developed from an AHRC-funded Network and series of workshops in 2010/11.

Helen Hills is recipient of numerous distinguished research awards and scholarships from the AHRC, British Academy, the Leverhulme Trust and the Getty.

Keynote addresses and papers at conferences and research seminars from Adelaide in Australia, to Santiago in Chile, and Harvard in the USA.

Departmental roles

  • Chair of Exams Committee (2019-21)
  • Chair of Exceptional Circumstances (2019-21)
  • Chair of Ethics Committee (2019-21)
  • Director of Sculpture Studies Research School (2016-2018)
  • Co-ordinator of Erasmus, Study Abroad, Global Programmes and Visiting Students (History of Art) (2016-2018)
  • Director of Postdoctoral Research Fellows and Writing Competition (2015-17)
  • University of York Athena Swan Committee and Forum Delegate (2016)
  • Research Concordat Officer (2015-2016)
  • Equality Champion (2015-2016)
  • Equal Opportunities Officer (2015-2016)
  • Research Mentor to Dr H. Vorholt
  • Director, LFA-Art History Programmes (2013-2014)
  • Chair, Departmental Research Committee (2006-2007, 2008-2012)
  • Department Management Team Member (2008-2012)
  • Library Officer (2006-07, 2008-09)
  • Representative on Digitization programme (2007-09)
  • Director of the Research School for Architectural History and Theory (2007-12)

University roles

  • University Research Committee (2007-2010)
  • University Research Forum (2007-2012)
  • Advisory Committee for Arts and Humanities for Promotions (2010-2015)
  • Research Concordat Officer (History of Art 2015-16)

Contact details

Helen Hills
Professor Emerita of Architectural and Art History
Department of History of Art
University of York
York
YO10 5DD