Dr William Hamilton

Lecturer in Art History and Design History

Dr William Hamilton is a lecturer in Art History and Design History, specialising in: modern art, the visual culture of war, national myth and memory, cartoons and comics, and the international illustrated press during the 19th and early 20th centuries. His research emphasises how the illustrated press presents pictorial journalism, humour, sport, adventure, literature and art as light-hearted amusements, while simultaneously debating contentious representations of military figures and legitimate heroic myths. He is also particularly interested in the permeable boundary between journalistic integrity and the use of illustration as entertainment that was variously: funny, reassuring, exciting, and sensationalist.

He has published on male and national identities in popular visual culture; and his current research focuses on pictorial representations of conflict in illustrated periodicals of the 19th and early 20th centuries. I completed my PhD at the University of Bristol, where he argues that comic art played a decisive role in contesting German national heroes during and after WWI. He questions the misconception that ‘traditional’ German comics simply lagged behind international examples, to show how they resisted global comics formulas in favour of local styles that contested regional identities. He shows how graphic art participated in inflammatory disagreements about the meaning and memory of WWI, mapping the fragmentation of heroic belief in Germany through visual culture.