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- Associate Honorary Professor of History of Art
- Dept of History of Art
- Faculty of S&HS
Hanna Hölling is Associate Professor in History of Art, Materials and Technology in the Department of History of Art, University College London. She joined UCL in 2016. Prior to this, she was Andrew W. Mellon Visiting Professor, Cultures of Conservation, at the Bard Graduate Center in New York (2013-15), Research Fellow at the University of Amsterdam (2009-13), and Head of Conservation at the ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany (2007-9). She obtained her PhD in 2013 from the University of Amsterdam, Institute of Art History and Cultural Studies and ASCA Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis.
Hanna's research was funded by the Terra Foundation for American Art (2019-20), the Swiss National Science Foundation (2019), the Getty Foundation (2016-17), Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (2013-15) and Dutch Research Council (2009-13). At UCL, she received UCL Global Engagement Funding to develop a research collaboration with Brazilian universities (2019-21), a Dean’s Strategic Fund Small Grant for Education and Research Activities at the Faculty of Social and Historical Sciences (2019), and has developed and supervised a UCL Laidlaw Scholarship project (2019-2020) in order to further expand The Cabinet of Obsolete Technologies (founded in 2017 as a research and teaching collection at the Department of History of Art).


Hanna works on the intersection of art history and theory, material culture studies, and conservation. Her primary research and teaching interests lie, among others, in ethics, aesthetics, and philosophy in and of conservation, contemporary and post-war art, technology-based media, theories of materiality and materialisms, and the concepts of time, change, identity, and archive (as discourse and physical space) both in artworks and in objects of material culture. In conservation, she focuses on the epistemic dimensions of conservation, that is, knowledge derived from, and generated by, diverse practices, theories, and cultures of conservation.
Hanna has taught the material histories and theories of art and conservation as well as histories of media and technology at the University of Amsterdam, Bard Graduate Center in New York and UCL.
At UCL Department of History of Art, she has thought the following modules: Intermedia: Art and Materiality in the 1960s and 70s (MA), Theory and History of Conservation (BA), Methodologies of Making (BA), and Methods and Materials of the Artist I&II (BA) and has organized a work placement module Art/Work/Spaces. She has also regularly contributed to the MA Core Course and BA Foundation Course.
Outside her core teaching activities, Hanna has given invited lectures, among others, at Columbia University, New York University, and at the universities in Europe and the UK. She has also contributed to the Summer Institute for Technical Studies in Art (SITSA), a doctoral school at the Harvard Art Museums.
Hanna has advised and examined MA and PhD students in UK and abroad. She welcomes informal enquiries about studying for a PhD in any of the areas of her research interests. She is especially interested in supervising research that would illuminate new directions for art history and technology studies situated on the intersection of art theory, material culture studies, and the theory of conservation. This might involve projects engaged in a reflective approach to new materialisms, experimental preservation and museology, critical heritage studies and historiographies and epistemes of conservation. Students of a variety of backgrounds, including those underrepresented, are encouraged to contact her.
24-MAR-2017 – 24-AUG-2017 | Guest Scholar | Getty Conservation Institute | The Getty Center, Los Angeles, United States |
01-OCT-2015 – 30-NOV-2015 | Visiting Scholar | Art and Knowledge Research Group | Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Germany |
01-AUG-2013 – 01-JUL-2015 | Andrew W Mellon Visiting Professor | Material Culture Studies | Bard Graduate Center, United States |
01-SEP-2009 – 31-AUG-2013 | Research Fellow | Art History and Cultural Studies | University of Amsterdam, Netherlands |
2007 – 2009 | Head of Conservation | Department of Conservation | Center for Art and Media, Germany |
2018 | ATQ03 - Recognised by the HEA as a Fellow | University College London |