Hannah Williams

I am an art historian specialising in the visual and material culture of 17th-century and 18th-century France. My specific research interests include portraiture and self-portraiture, artistic communities and social networks in Paris, the history of art institutions (e.g. the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, and the Louvre), and religious art. My research is informed by approaches from microhistory, anthropology, and material culture studies.

I am a Junior Research Fellow in Art History at St John's College, University of Oxford. I did my undergraduate degree at the University of Sydney and completed my Masters and PhD at the Courtauld Institute of Art (University of London).

My first book, Académie Royale: A History in Portraits, is forthcoming with Ashgate in 2014. I am currently working on two book projects: Artists and the Church in Eighteenth-Century Paris and Lost Property: Eighteenth-Century Artists' Things Recovered (the latter in collaboration with Katie Scott). I am also working on a digital history project entitled Mapping 18th-Century Paris: Artists and their Neighbourhoods (funded by the John Fell Research Fund).