Dr. Amelia Hope Jones

Biography

Amelia Hope-Jones is a Teaching Fellow in Art History at Edinburgh College of Art, specializing in visual cultures from pre-early modern Italy. Her research interests focus on the eremitic landscapes and the representation of desert imagery within Byzantine and Italian art around 1500. Dr. Hope-Jones explores the relationship between images and textual sources within late-medieval visual cultures, particularly concerning religious ideas. She is engaged in ecocritical methodologies, examining places understood as wilderness and the practices of representation associated with ascetic communities, notably the friendships among hermits in the desert. Her recent research includes a queer re-reading of monastic relationships represented in visual sources, proposing new interpretations of how desert imagery could embody radical and utopian visions of religious life. As the Programme Director of History of Art, Theory and Display MSc, she emphasizes discipline-specific pedagogy and is actively involved in diversifying assessment methods to enhance student progression. Her publications appear in notable journals like Gesta and she has presented her work at significant conferences such as the Renaissance Society of America and the Leeds International Medieval Congress. With a PhD from the University of Edinburgh, her doctoral thesis explored the thirteenth-century Italian painted tabernacle in the National Galleries of Scotland.

Research Interests