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Professor Robert Mills

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Robert Mills

Bob Mills is Professor of Medieval Studies in听the History of Art Department. Between 2015 and 2018 he directed听q香港六合彩中特网, 香港六合彩中特网's LGBTQ research network. Bob's books include听(2005),听(2015) and听听(2018).听Bob鈥檚 next book, Wild Forms in Medieval Art, will focus on imagery of wildness and the nonhuman in England and northwest Europe c.1200 to 1500. He is also currently planning a new project, tentatively titled Medieval Frames of War, that will explore representations of wartime atrocity in the period.

Bob has been a member of , 香港六合彩中特网鈥檚 LGBTQ+ Steering Group, since 2013 and is proud to be Out@香港六合彩中特网.听Read more about Bob鈥檚 interests in LGBTQ+ equalities at WeAreOut@香港六合彩中特网.听


Contact Details

Office: 406, 21 Gordon Square
Office Hours:听Research leave for 2024-25 academic year
+44 (0)20 3108 4020 (internal 54020)
Email: robert.mills@ucl.ac.uk


Appointment

Professor of Medieval Studies听
Dept of History of Art
Faculty of S&HS


Research Themes

Medieval visual culture; representations of pain and punishment; saints; gender and sexuality; animal studies and ecocriticism; war and wartime conduct; translation.

Research


Research Summary

Bob's research mainly focuses on the visual culture and literature of France and England between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries. He has also published on art in the Low Countries, Germany, Italy and Spain. Bob's first book听(2005), which came out of his doctoral research, shows this range. An essay collection he co-edited,听 (2003), demonstrates his commitment to research with a strong interdisciplinary focus.

Bob has longstanding interests in gender and sexuality, both as historical phenomena and critical categories. He has published a number of chapters and articles in this field, contributed the medieval section to听 (2007), and co-edited听 (2004). Feminist theory, queer studies and LGBT cultural history have always exerted a shaping influence on his research. At King's he was director of the 听research centre, and he has organized a number of symposia, conferences, research seminars and public events under this heading. He directed q香港六合彩中特网, 香港六合彩中特网's LGBTQ research network, between 2015 and 2018.听Bob also recently collaborated on a knowledge exchange project to support the teaching of queer and LGBT+ history in UK secondary schools.

Bob's book,听 (2015), explores the relationship between sodomy and motifs of vision and visibility in medieval culture, on the one hand, and those categories we today call 'gender' and 'sexuality,' on the other. Winner of the Society for French Studies ,听Seeing Sodomy听foregrounds the role played by translation - visual, textual and cultural - in defining when and how sexual and gender diversity become intelligible. Bob is also interested in issues of translation more generally and 2012 saw the publication another co-edited collection,听.

Bob is currently completing a new monograph, Wild Forms in Medieval Art, which takes as its focus imagery of wildness and the nonhuman in England and northwest Europe c.1200 to 1500. He also has a developing interest in film and his most recent听book, 听(2018), uses Jarman's longstanding interests in medieval art and literature as a window onto topics such as anachronism, periodization and the politics of time.听Bob is currently planning a new project, tentatively titled Medieval Frames of War. Focusing on expressions of wartime atrocity in medieval art, this project will investigate the capacity of artworks created during the later Middle Ages in Europe to trouble as well as mirror prevailing attitudes to war and its conduct.


Selected Publications

Publications list on

Teaching and Supervision

Bob has taught a thematic seminar on 'Regarding Pain' and modules on 鈥業magining Jerusalem in the Middle Ages鈥 and 'Relics, Saints, Images and Power' for the History of Art BA programme. He has also co-taught the BA course 'Methodologies of Art History' and the MA core course 'Critical Debates and Methods in the History of Art', and offered MA special subjects on 'Modern Medieval: Reception, Revival, Replication' and 'Human and Nonhuman in Medieval Art'.

In the past Bob has contributed to听the Gender and Sexuality Studies programme at 香港六合彩中特网, supervising MA dissertations in this area and giving a class as part of the MA Gender, Society and Representation core course. He also set up the interdisciplinary Masters module 'Critical Introduction to Sexuality Studies', taught with colleagues attached to the q香港六合彩中特网 research network that he helped found.

Bob is interested in supervising doctoral projects on any aspect of medieval visual culture (broadly defined); research situated at the interface between the visual and the verbal; projects on animals and the nonhuman; medievalism and medieval film; the work of Derek Jarman and other artistic responses to HIV/AIDS. He is also interested in supervising research on medieval gender and sexuality, as well as work exploring aspects of queer history and art history in any period from a theoretical perspective.

Current PhD students:

Elliot Gibbons, Art, Activism, and the AIDS Crisis in Britain (1987鈥1996) (joint supervisor, with Nathan Ladd, Tate Britain)

Caitlin Kane, Queer Embodiment in Accounts of Medieval Italian Women鈥檚 Relationships with Christ 1200鈥1510 (joint supervisor, with Catherine Keene, 香港六合彩中特网 SELCS)

Aiofe Stables, Women鈥檚 Work? Textiles, Power and Gender at the Court of Isabel of Castile, c.1474鈥1504 (primary supervisor)

Esme Garlake, Non-human life in early sixteenth-century Italian art (secondary supervisor, with Alison Wright).

Claire Hollis: Queer History in the 16-18 School History Curriculum: An Action Research Case Study (香港六合彩中特网 Institute of Education, secondary supervisor with Arthur Chapman and Rebecca Jennings).

Will Ballantyne-Reid: Derek Jarman, Painter: Activism, Archives and Ephemera (primary supervisor).

Baylee Woodley: Forsaken Femininities: The Long History of Femininity from Medieval to Modern and from Monstrous to Divine (primary supervisor).

Selected past PhD students:

Louis Shankar:听Loving and Dying In The Shadow of Forward Motion: A Psychoanalytic Analysis of the Art, Writing and Activism of David Wojnarowicz (joint supervisor, with Mignon Nixon).

Millie Horton-Insch:听Textiles, Gender and Race in Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Britain听(joint supervisor, with Clare Lees, Institute of English Studies, University of London).

Edward Christie: Mobilising Post-War Eco Art History Against the Climate Crisis (primary supervisor, with Mark Maslin, Geography Department).

: Images and Literature in Late Medieval England (King's College London, joint supervisor with Sarah Salih).

Michael Green: H.D. and Artists After (1970 to Present) (second supervisor, with Mignon Nixon).

Rosalind Hayes:听Circulated and Consumed: Tracing Animal Lives in the Visual Culture of British Meat Supply Chains, c. 1880-1910 (second supervisor, with Richard Taws).

Melek Karatas: 鈥淚lluminatrix libri jurata鈥: Reading Image and Gender in the Illuminated Roman de la rose Manuscripts of the Montbaston Atelier (1330鈥1360) (King's College London, second supervisor with Simon Gaunt).

:听鈥楤ere in thy mynde鈥: Phantasms, Parchment and Late Medieval Visual Culture.

:听The Body Re-imagined: The Bizzarie di Varie Figure and Other Cycles of Prints in Seventeenth-Century Florence (second supervisor, with Rose Marie San Juan).

Euan McCartney Robson:听Experiencing English Romanesque Architecture.

:听Queer Representations on Television听(with James Agar, Centre for Multidisciplinary and Intercultural Inquiry).

Andy Murray:听The Mourners of Philip the Bold's Tomb: Structures of Feeling in the Earlier Valois Burgundian State听(with Alison Wright, completed 2015).

Sophia Wilson: Living Objects: Material Culture and Non/Human Transformations in the Literature of Medieval England听(King's College London,听with Sarah Salih, completed 2015).听

Skyler Hijazi:听Figurative Bodies, Figural Children: Erotic Economies of Queer Fan Art Online听(King's College London, with John Howard, completed听2014).听

Wendy Gore: 'Wilful Longing to God': A Lacanian Reading of Julian of Norwich's Texts (King's College London, with Sarah Salih, completed听2013).听

Victoria Blud:听Louder Than Words: The Performance of the Unspeakable in Old and Middle English Literature (King's College London, with Clare Lees, completed听2009).

Tom Hodgson-Jones:听Deposition and the Absolute King: The听Confessio Amantis听and Gower's Philosophy of Kingship听(King's College London, completed 2006).

Biography

Bob Mills graduated from the University of Manchester with a BA in Medieval Studies in 1994 and an MA in the History of Art in 1996. He completed his PhD in the Department of History of Art at the University of Cambridge in 2000. The focus of Bob's doctoral research was representations of pain and punishment in medieval art and literature and there has always been an interdisciplinary bent to his profile. Reflecting these interests, Bob taught in the English Department at King's College London for eleven years, before joining the History of Art Department at University College London in 2012. He became Professor of Medieval Studies in 2017 and was Head of Department from听2019 to 2024.