Skip to main content
School of Society and Environment - Department of History
  1. School of Society and Environment - Department of History
  2. People
  3. Academic Staff
  4. Profiles

Dr Hannah Williams

Hannah

Reader in the History of Art

Email: hannah.williams@qmul.ac.uk
Telephone: 02078828360
Room Number: ArtsTwo 3.07

Profile

I am an art historian, specialising in the visual and material culture of France in the long eighteenth century. I have particular interests in social, religious, urban, and decolonial histories of the Paris art world.

I did my BA (Hons) at the University of Sydney followed by an MA and PhD in Art History at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. Prior to joining QMUL in 2019, I was a Junior Research Fellow at St John’s College, Oxford, a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at QMUL, and a Chercheure at École normale supérieure and C2RMF in Paris.

I am a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Bluesky: @drhanwill 

Undergraduate Teaching

I convene the following undergraduate modules:

  • HST5433 & HST5446 – London and its Museums
  • HST5714 – Marie Antoinette to Coco Chanel: A Cultural History of France
  • HST5434 – Art and the City from Michelangelo to Blade Runner
  • HST6219 – Art and Power in Early Modern Europe

Postgraduate Teaching

I contribute to the following degree programmes:

  • MA History
  • MA Urban History and Culture

Research

Research Interests:

  • 18th-century French art and material culture
  • histories of Paris
  • art worlds, the artist’s studio / space, place, and social networks
  • religion and religious art in France
  • maps and mapping / digital art history
  • legacies of slavery and colonialism in French art collections

 

Research Projects

My research focuses on the Paris art world – one of western culture’s most dynamic sites – exploring the vibrant interconnections among artists, academies, markets, patrons, collectors, exhibitions, materials, objects, and spaces.

 

Art-World Institutions: My first book, Académie Royale: A History in Portraits (Routledge, 2015), was a behind-the-scenes study of the most important art institution in early modern France. Using an anthropological approach, the book analyses artists’ portraits – as visual images and ritual objects – to uncover the fascinating histories (official and unofficial) of Paris’s elite artistic community in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I have also written about the Louvre as an art-world institution, in particular its pre-revolutionary life as home to the Academy, to generations of artists, and to many other state cultural institutions (see Publications).

 

Artists’ Lives and Material Culture: My second book, Artists’ Things: Rediscovering Lost Property from 18th-Century France (Getty, 2024), co-authored with Katie Scott, is an alternative history of the Paris art world told via material ‘things’. Through short essays devoted to individual objects once owned by artists (a pair of glasses, a sword, a sugar spoon, a wig…), the book illuminates unfamiliar dimensions of France’s artistic figures, while celebrating the capacity of ordinary objects to tell extraordinary stories. You can explore all the objects on the open-access digital edition of the book. I also pursued a similar biographical approach in an article for Oxford Art Journal that tells the story of an artist’s suicide via police archives (inventories, witness statements, and autopsy reports).

 

Religion: I am currently working on my third book, Paris’s Parishes: Art and Religion in the Enlightenment City, investigating the crucial question of religion in Enlightenment France. This book focuses on the parish churches of Paris as centres of lived religion in the eighteenth-century city. Through a study of the material objects that artists created for local urban churches, I explore little-known religious dimensions of the Paris art world, while offering an art-historical contribution to revisionist arguments challenging narratives of religious decline and secularization in pre-Revolutionary France. This is an approach I have also taken in an article about St Geneviève’s miracles in French History, which foregrounds art and material culture as sources for religious social history.

 

Maps and Digital Mapping: I am interested in the interplay of maps as historical objects and digital mapping as a historical method. My first digital mapping project, Artists in Paris: Mapping the 18th-Century Art World, was developed in collaboration with Chris Sparks. It is a cartographic exploration of Paris’s art world that maps the homes and studios of artists in the pre-revolutionary city. The resulting digital map grants new insights into Paris’s cultural geography in this period, which I have written about in an article for Urban History. I have also written about the evolution of this as a digital humanities project in an article for Journal18.

 

Legacies of Slavery and Colonialism: I am currently working on a digital-mapping and data-visualisation project in collaboration with Meredith Martin, entitled Colonial Networks: Remapping the ‘Paris’ Art World in Haiti/Saint-Domingue. This project explores the deep but little-known connections between the Paris art world and Haiti (formerly ‘Saint-Domingue’), France’s most profitable colony before the French and Haitian Revolutions. Using colonial property maps as sources, we are identifying major art collectors who were absentee planters and enslavers, retrieving the colonial networks that extended through the Paris art world, and tracing artworks now in public museums that have links to these colonial entanglements. We are collaborating with several museums to amplify artworks as storytellers in these histories and are also experimenting with Critical Counter-Mapping as a method to reinscribe colonial maps with Black and Indigenous geographies of art.

 

Publications

Artists' Things book coverArt-world institutions book cover

Books

 

Websites

  • Colonial Networks: Remapping the ‘Paris’ Art World in Haiti/Saint-Domingue (2024), colonialnetworks.org. Co-directed with Meredith Martin.
  • Artists in Paris: Mapping the 18th-Century Art World (2018), artistsinparis.org. Co-created with Chris Sparks. Awarded the BSECS Digital Resources Award 2021.

 

Films

 

Journal Articles

 

Chapters in Edited Books

  • “A Room of Portraits: Insiders and Outsiders at the Académie”, in The Académie Royale’s Art Collection, vol. I Reception Pieces, eds. M. Castor, S. Dmitrieva, and A. Klammt (Paris: Passages Online, 2025).
  • “Du Salon à l’autel: l’art religieux et l’espace sacré dans le Paris des Lumières”, in Entre croyance aux miracles et iconoclasme: l’espace sacré en France au XVIIIe siècle, M. Castor, M. Schieder, and W. Windorf (Paris/Heidelberg: Passages Online, 2024), 19-36.
  • “Witnessing Illusion: Looking Up in the Churches of Paris”, in Le Théâtre et la Peinture dans les discours académiques (1630-1730): La vraisemblance ou les enjeux de la représentation, eds. M. Castor, K. Dickhaut, and S. T. Kilian (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2023), 95-114.
  • “Lever les yeux vers le ciel: illusion et vraisemblance sur les plafonds peints des églises parisiennes”, in L’art de l’Ancien Régime: Sortir du rang !, eds. T. Kirchner, S. Raux, and M. Schneider (Paris/Heidelberg: Passages Online, 2022), 327-344.
  • “The Other Palace: Versailles and the Louvre”, in The Versailles Effect: Objects, Lives, and Afterlives of the Domaine, eds. M. Ledbury and R. Wellington (New York: Bloomsbury, 2021), 13-32.
  • “Drifting through the Louvre: A Local Guide to the French Academy”, in Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds: Global and Local Geographies of Art, eds. S. Sloboda and M. Yonan (New York: Bloomsbury, 2019), 171-189.
  • “Lebrun contre Mignard: rivalité dans le monde de l’art”, La Dispute: Cas, Querelles, Contraverses et Création à l’Époque Moderne, eds. J.-M. Hostiou & A. Tadié (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2019), 243-260.
  • “Staging Belief: Immersive Encounters and the Agency of Religious Art in Eighteenth-Century Paris”, The Agency of Display: Objects, Framings and Parerga, eds. J. Grave, C. Holm, V. Kobi, and C. Van Eck, (Dresden: Sandstein Verlag, 2018), 62-78.
  • “Painters and Parish Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris: Art, Religion, and Sociability”, in Artistes, savants et amateurs: Art et sociabilité au XVIIIe siècle (1715-1815), eds. J. Fripp, A. Gorse, N. Manceau, and N. Struckmeyer (Paris: Mare & Martin, 2016), 101-112.
  • “Art and Things: Fragonard’s Colour Box”, in The Material Cultures of Enlightenment Arts and Sciences, eds. A. Craciun and S. Schaffer (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016), 157-159.
  • “Everyday Lives and Luxury Objects: François Boucher’s Shells and Charles-Antoine Coypel’s Watch”, Le commerce du luxe, eds. N. Coquery & A. Bonnet (Paris: Mare & Martin, 2015), 228-241. Co-authored with Katie Scott.
  • “Le peintre gravé et les graveurs peints: les portraits d’amitié de Hyacinthe Rigaud et ses graveurs”, Drückgraphik: Zwischen Reproduktion und Invention, eds. M. Castor, J. Kettner, C. Melzer, C. Schnitzer (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2010), 55-66.

 

Edited Journal Special Issues

 

Exhibition Catalogues

  • Vassé’s Design for Notre-Dame Altar & Restout’s St Peter healing the Paralysed Man (object entries), Promenades on Paper: Eighteenth-Century French Drawings from the Bibliothèque nationale de France (Williamstown: Clark Art Institute; Paris: BnF, 2022), 150-154, 156-157.
  • “Paris”, Hogarth and Europe (London: Tate Britain, 2021), 40-45.
  • “Les voyages des laques”, Exotic? Switzerland Looking Outward in the Age of Enlightenment (Lausanne: Palais de Rumine, 2020), 128-129.
  • “Drawing In / Drawing Out”, CLOSE: Drawn Portraits (London: The Drawing Room, 2018), 15-29.
  • “Le Louvre de Demachy: le palais et le quartier au XVIIIe siècle”, Pierre-Antoine Demachy: le témoin méconnu (Versailles: Musée Lambinet, 2014), 28-41.

Supervision

I welcome applications from candidates wishing to pursue doctoral research, especially in the following areas:

  • French art, architecture, visual & material culture
  • 18th-century European cultural history
  • social, material, urban, and decolonial histories of art worlds
  • art history and digital humanities approaches (especially spatial and mapping projects)

Current PhD students

  • Marie Giraud, Women, Jansenism, and Print Culture in Eighteenth-Century France
  • Cécile Guigui, Visual Biographies: Constructing Algerian Jewish Family Photographic Practices, 1890-1962
  • Salomé Jacques, The Impact of the Paris Commune on Impressionist Representations of Women

Past PhD students

  • Dr Anaïs Pedron (2025), Theatre Women and the Question of Rights in Paris, 1750-1800

Public Engagement

Impact and Public Engagement

Through my research on Colonial Networks with Meredith Martin, we are collaborating with several museum partners to share original research and co-create approaches to legacies of slavery and colonialism in collections of European art. Our collaborations seek to amplify artworks as active vehicles for communicating their complex histories, and to harness the possibilities of digital approaches for making the past meaningful and accessible for wide contemporary audiences.

Our first collaboration was with the National Gallery in London and resulted in the co-production of a short film, Linked Lives, and an original piece by contemporary poet, Madeleine Le Cesne. In the film, the gallery’s 1758 portrait of the Comte de Vaudreuil (a French aristocrat, art collector, and enslaver) is connected to the National Portrait Gallery’s painting of The Anti-Slavery Society Convention of 1840. The story is explored from the perspective of Madeleine and her family history, especially her ancestor Louis-Celeste Lecesne, who is one of the abolitionists at the Convention. 

Watch the video with the National Gallery here.

 

Digital open access in Art History

J18 logo

Journal18 was one of the first online journals in art history and the first journal – print or digital – devoted to global eighteenth-century art and culture. It is still one of the only fully open-access journals in art history that is free for authors to publish and free for readers to access.

I created Journal18 in 2015 with Meredith Martin (New York University) and Noémie Etienne (University of Vienna). As founding editors, we have worked to make Journal18 a space for rigorous scholarship in the field, as well as a vibrant forum for exchange, experimentation, and innovation. Journal18 has been awarded an ARIAH Digital Development Award for Art History Publishing.

 

 Other Media

Back to top