Professor Robert Mills

Professor of Medieval Studies

Robert Mills

Bob Mills is Professor of Medieval Studies in UCL History of Art and he was Head of Department between 2019 and 2024. Bob 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, supervised by Professor Paul Binski, 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 UCL in 2012. He became Professor of Medieval Studies here in 2017.

Bob's books include Suspended Animation: Pain, Pleasure and Punishment in Medieval Culture (2005), Seeing Sodomy in the Middle Ages (2015) and Derek Jarman's Medieval Modern (2018). His next book, Wild Forms in Medieval Art, will focus on imagery of wildness and the nonhuman in Britain c.1200 to 1500. Bob is also currently planning a new project, tentatively titled Medieval Frames of War, that will explore representations of wartime atrocity in the period.

Between 2015 and 2018 Bob directed qUCL, UCL's LGBTQ research network, and previously he helped found and was the inaugural director of Queer@King’s. Bob was a member of LESG, UCL’s LGBTQ+ Steering Group, between 2013 and 2024 and he is proud to be Out@UCL. Read more about Bob’s interests in LGBTQ+ equalities at WeAreOut@UCL.

Research

Bob's research mainly focuses on visual and literary culture in France and England, c.1100–1500. He has also published on art in the Low Countries, Germany, Italy and Spain. Bob's first book Suspended Animation: Pain, Pleasure and Punishment in Medieval Culture (2005), which grew out of his doctoral research, shows this range. 

Bob has longstanding interests in histories of gender and sexuality. He contributed the medieval section to A Gay History of Britain (2007), and helped found and directed the Queer@King's and qUCL research networks. 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, Seeing Sodomy in the Middle Ages (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 R. Gapper Book Prize, Seeing Sodomy foregrounds the role played by translation – visual, textual and cultural – in defining when and how sexual and gender diversity become intelligible. 

Bob is currently completing a monograph, Wild Forms in Medieval Art, which takes as its focus imagery of wildness and the nonhuman in Britain c.1200–1500. He also has interests in representations of history on film and his book Derek Jarman's Medieval Modern (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. 

Bob is also now 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.

Specialisms

Medieval visual and literary culture; gender, sexuality and queer studies; histories of violence

Selected Publications

Derek Jarman’s Medieval Modern. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2018.

Seeing Sodomy in the Middle Ages. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.

Rethinking Medieval Translation: Ethics, Politics, Theory. Co-editor, with Emma Campbell. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2012.

Suspended Animation: Pain, Pleasure and Punishment in Medieval Culture. London: Reaktion, 2005.

The Monstrous Middle Ages. Co-editor, with Bettina Bildhauer. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003.

Full publications list on UCL Profiles.

Teaching and Supervision

Bob has taught a thematic seminar on 'Regarding Pain' and modules on ‘Imagining Jerusalem in the Middle Ages’ 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 the Gender and Sexuality Studies programme at UCL, 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 qUCL 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:

  • Lena Szalewska: Women of the Apocalypse: The Spectacle of Gendered Bodies in Alpine Apocalyptic Painting, c.1350-1530 (primary supervisor).
  • Alex Jarvis: Drag Knights and Wolf Kings (King's College London, joint supervisor with Alice Hazard).
  • Elliot Gibbons, Art, Activism, and the AIDS Crisis in Britain (1987–1996) (joint supervisor, with Nathan Ladd, Tate Britain)
  • Caitlin Kane, Queer Embodiment in Accounts of Medieval Italian Women’s Relationships with Christ 1200–1510 (joint supervisor, with Catherine Keene, UCL SELCS)
  • Aiofe Stables, Women’s Work? Textiles, Power and Gender at the Court of Isabel of Castile, c.1474–1504 (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 (UCL Institute of Education, secondary supervisor with Arthur Chapman and Rebecca Jennings).

Selected past PhD students:

  • Will Ballantyne-Reid: Derek Jarman, Painter: Activism, Archives and Ephemera (primary supervisor). Completed 2024.
  • Baylee Woodley: Medieval Femmes: Exploring Queer Femininities in the Visual Culture of Late Medieval England and France (primary supervisor). Completed 2024.

    Louis Shankar: ‘We Are Born Into A Preinvented Existence’: A Psychoanalytic Investigation into the Art of David Wojnarowicz in 1989 (joint supervisor, with Mignon Nixon). Completed 2024.
  • Millie Horton-Insch: Textiles, Gender and Race in Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Britain (joint supervisor, with Clare Lees, Institute of English Studies, University of London). Completed 2024.
  • Edward Christie: Mobilising Post-War Eco Art History Against the Climate Crisis (primary supervisor). Completed 2023.
  • Michael Green: Thinking Back: Artistic Returns to H.D. (secondary supervisor, with Mignon Nixon). Completed 2022.
  • Rosalind Hayes: ‘Look to Your Eating’: Animals, Meat and Visual Culture in Britain, c.1880–1910 (secondary supervisor, with Richard Taws). Completed 2022.
  • Eduardo Correia: Beyond the Lines: Materiality and Non-Linear Time in Medieval English Literature (King's College London, joint supervisor with Sarah Salih). Completed 2021.
  • Melek Karatas: “Illuminatrix libri jurata”: Reading Image and Gender in the Illuminated Roman de la rose Manuscripts of the Montbaston Atelier (1330–1360) (King's College London, secondary supervisor with Simon Gaunt). Completed 2020.
  • Lauren Rozenberg: ‘Bere in thy mynde’: Phantasms, Parchment and Late Medieval Visual Culture (primary supervisor). Completed 2020.
  • Laura Spada: 'Un gregge di vari capricci': Bizarre Bodies in Seventeenth-Century Florentine Print Albums (secondary supervisor, with Rose Marie San Juan). Completed 2020.
  • Euan McCartney Robson: A Cathedral Encountered: Stories and Storytelling in Medieval Durham (primary supervisor). Completed 2019.
  • Magali Burnichon: Queer Representations on Television (secondary supervisor, with James Agar, Centre for Multidisciplinary and Intercultural Inquiry). Completed 2018.
  • Andy Murray: The Mourners of Philip the Bold's Tomb: Structures of Feeling in the Earlier Valois Burgundian State (secondary supervisor, with Alison Wright). Completed 2016.
  • Sophia Wilson: Living Objects: Material Culture and Non/Human Transformations in the Literature of Medieval England (King’s College London, joint supervisor with Sarah Salih). Completed 2015.
  • Skyler Hijazi: Figurative Bodies, Figural Children: Erotic Economies of Queer Fan Art Online (King's College London, secondary supervisor with John Howard). Completed 2014.
  • Wendy Gore: 'Wilful Longing to God': A Lacanian Reading of Julian of Norwich's Texts (King's College London, joint supervisor with Sarah Salih). Completed 2013.
  • Victoria Blud: Louder Than Words: The Performance of the Unspeakable in Old and Middle English Literature (King's College London, secondary supervisor with Clare Lees). Completed 2009.
  • Tom Hodgson-Jones: Deposition and the Absolute King: The Confessio Amantis and Gower's Philosophy of Kingship (King's College London, primary supervisor). Completed 2006.

Teaching Modules (Research Leave in 2024/25)

BA 2nd year period option: HART0162 Imagining Jerusalem in the Middle Ages

BA final year special subject: HART0199 Sex and Gender in Medieval Art

MA special subject: HART0155: Modern Medieval: Reception, Revival, Replication

Contact

Email: robert.mills@ucl.ac.uk

Office: 406, 21 Gordon Square

Office Hours: Mondays, 14.30-15.30 and Wednesdays 11.00-12.00