Honorary Staff and Emeritus Professors

Dr Hanna B. Hölling 

Dr Hanna B. Hölling is affiliated to the Department as an Honorary Associate Professor, an appointment which runs until September 2027. Hanna was previously an Associate Professor in History of Art, Materials and Technology and co-convener of the BA programme History of Art, Materials and Technology. Her teaching and advising addressed subjects in art history and theory, material (culture) studies, conservation, and American and European art produced since the 1960s.
 

Professor Andrew Hemingway 

Andrew Hemingway was educated at the universities of Hull, East Anglia, and London. He taught full time in higher education from 1974 and joined UCL in 1987, becoming a reader in history of art in 1993 and professor in 2003. His on-going research interests include U.S. art and politics in the early 20th century, Neue Sachlichkeit and German realisms of the Weimar period, and the historiography of Marxist art history. His books include Landscape Imagery and Urban Culture in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge University Press, 1992), Artists on the Left: American Artists and the Communist Movement, 1926-1956 (Yale University Press, 2002), The Mysticism of Money: Precisionist Painting and Machine Age America (Periscope, 2013), and the edited volume Marxism and the History of Art: From William Morris to the New Left (Pluto Press, 2006).
 

Professor Fred Schwartz 

Frederic J. Schwartz's interests include all areas of the visual culture and built environment in the German-speaking world from the late nineteenth century to the present. He has lectured and published widely on modern architecture and design, the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, the German avant-garde of the early twentieth century and the History of Art as an academic discipline. His books include The Werkbund: Design Theory and Mass Culture Before the First World War (Yale University Press, 1996) and Blind Spots: Critical Theory and the History of Art in Twentieth-Century Germany (Yale University Press, 2005). Fred retired in 2022. 
 

Professor Christopher Wilson

Christopher Wilson (PhD Courtauld Institute) taught the history of medieval architecture and figural arts from c.1100 to c.1500. Most of his research is on English religious and secular architecture of the same period, with an emphasis on episodes of receptivity to ideas from Continental Europe. Other interests include funerary monuments and sculpture, saints' shrines, and Scottish medieval architecture. Independent publications include The Shrines of Saint William of York (York, Yorkshire Museum, 1977), The Gothic Cathedral. The Architecture of the Great Church 1140-1550 (London, Thames and Hudson, 1990).
 

Dr Emma Richardson

Emma was an Associate Professor of Materials and Metrology and Head of the Material Studies Laboratory. She received her PhD in Analytical Chemistry from the University of Southampton in 2009, and subsequently took the position of Post-doctoral Fellow at the Getty Conservation Institute (2009-2012). Since joining the Department of History of Art in 2012 she has attracted over £500,000 of funding for laboratory equipment and research. She co-curated the exhibition Dangerous Diaries: Exploring Risks and Rewards in Fabrication, which forms part of a larger collaborative research project with the Institute of Making, which studies the perceptions of risk and how approaches to hands-on engagement with materials have changed over time.
 

Professor Mechthild Fend

Mechthild joined the department in 2006, specialising in French 18th- and 19th-century art and visual culture and the historically changing relations between art and science. Her work was driven by a feminist perspective and an interest in the complex relationships between body and image. She has also published on art theory and the historiography of art history, and she has lectured and published widely on skin, flesh tones, skin colour and artistic anatomy. Previously she was a research scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. She also held a number of prestigious post-doctoral fellowships and awards, including a Getty Postdoctoral Fellowship and a membership at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton. 
 

Diana Dethloff

Diana was a specialist in seventeenth-century British art, especially portraiture of the second half of this period, her teaching covered Elizabethan and early Stuart painting. She has lectured and presented conference papers at the National Portrait Gallery, London; the V&A; the National Gallery; The Royal Academy; the Scottish National Portrait Gallery; The Drawing Institute, the Morgan Library, New York; the Universities of Oxford, York, Greenwich, Melbourne and Queen's University, Toronto. She has published on Restoration portraiture, especially the work of Peter Lely and his studio; on the development of the London art market and drawing practice in later seventeenth-century Britain.
 

Dr Nina Pearlman

Nina Pearlman is a strategy consultant, researcher, and curator working at the intersection of museums, governance, heritage collections, and new technologies that broaden access to cultural heritage. Her art historical research focuses on British art, the history of art education, and the history of collecting.

From 2008 to February 2025, she served as Head of UCL Art Collections. During her tenure, she established the Curating Equality research hub and advanced research into artistic ambition, student networks, and underrepresented narratives within the museum’s Slade Collections, 45% of which comprises work by women, many of whom remain under-researched.

Her work also includes the application of new technologies to enhance accessibility and uncover hidden histories in institutional collections. From 2021 to 2024, she was Senior Researcher (Co-Investigator) with the Sloane Lab: Looking Back to Build Future Shared Collections, a £2.5m collaborative project funded by the Towards a National Collection programme. Nina co-led the project’s participatory research and institutional engagement strategies.

She is currently a board member of Craftspace, a Birmingham-based charity dedicated to supporting excellence in contemporary craft.