Dr Rosemary Hill
Independent scholar
BA, MA, FRSL, FSA
Quondam Fellow since 2011
My subject is cultural history, focusing on the period 1750-1900. My principal interest is in the connection between objects and ideas, the expression of abstract concepts in three-dimensional artefacts. I have written on this theme in the context of the Victorian Gothic Revival, the cultural history of Stonehenge and antiquarianism in the Romantic period.
- Visiting Fellowship at Melbourne University department of Architecture Building and Planning (2023)
- Member of sub-committee of the sponsor body for Restoration and Renewal at the Palace of Westminster (2021)
- Member of English Heritage Blue Plaques Panel (from 2014 to 2022)
- Visiting Research Professor, York University, Department of History of Art and Architecture (from 2014 to 2016)
- Senior Researcher on AHRC-funded project 'St Stephen’s Chapel Westminster: visual and political culture 1292-1941' (from 2014 to 2016)
- Mellon Senior Research Fellow (from 2013 to 2014)
- Quondam Fellow, All Souls College (from 2011)
- Two-Year Fellow, All Souls College (from 2009 to 2011)
- PhD, Queen Mary, University of London (from 2007 to 2011)
- English Literature, BA Hons, Newnham College, Cambridge (from 1976 to 1979)
- Victorian architecture
- John Vanbrugh and Sarah Duchess of Marlborough
Books:
- Time’s Witness: History in the age of Romanticism (Allen Lane) (2021)
- Stonehenge (Profile) (2008)
- God’s Architect: Pugin and the building of Romantic Britain (Allen Lane) (2007)
Articles:
- Essay in Why We Read: 70 Writers on non-fiction, (Penguin) (2022)
- ‘Populist Palatial’ London’s West End: creating the pleasure district, 1800-1914, by Rohan McWilliam and Survey of London: volume 53, Oxford Street (4 March,2021)
- London Review of Books (see www.lrb.co.uk for full index) includes:
‘A Keen Demand for Camberwells’ Inventing the property market in modern Britain, by Desmond Fitz-Gibbon (21 March 2019) - “‘Proceeding like Guy Faux’: The Antiquarian Investigation of St Stephen’s Chapel Westminster, 1790–1837.” Architectural History, vol. 59 (2016)
- Contributing editor, London Review of Books (from 2012)
- Lecturer the Victorian Society of America Summer School (from 1997)
- Trustee, Pugin Society (from 1994)