Jason Hill

Biography

Professor Jason Hill specializes in the histories of modern and contemporary art, photography, and media, focusing on American art's longstanding and always dynamic relationship with the cultures of mass media and journalism. He is presently writing a book that considers the technological and cultural alignments of lens-based news media and police in the United States since the widespread introduction of police radio systems in the 1930s.

Jason's recent book, Artist as Reporter: Weegee, Ad Reinhardt, and the PM News Picture (2018), considers this 1940s New York City newspaper's activation of creative visual media (especially cartooning, illustration, and photography) in the service of combatting both fascism and the related dangers inherent in journalism's otherwise normative claims to objectivity. He is also co-editor (with Vanessa R. Schwartz) of Getting the Picture: The Visual Culture of the News (Bloomsbury, 2015), which assembles an interdisciplinary and international team of scholars to chart the shifting terrain of pictorial journalism from the early nineteenth century to the present.

Jason received his Ph.D. in Art History at the University of Southern California in 2011, where he also completed the Visual Studies Graduate Certificate. He completed his M.A. in Art History at Tufts University in 2004 and his B.A. in Political Science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 2001. Before that he was a painting major at Mass Art. Prior to joining the Department of Art History at the University of Delaware in 2015, Jason was 2014-15 Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the New-York Historical Society and 2011-13 Terra Foundation Fellow at the Institut National d'Histoire de l'Art in Paris. He has also taught at the École Normale Supérieure, Sciences Po, Université Paris X Nanterre, and UNLV.

Jason is a 2025-2025 Ailsa Mellon Bruce Senior Fellow at the Center for the Advanced Study of the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. In Spring and Summer of 2024 he was a Getty Scholar at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

Publications

“Metropolitan Division: Ken Gonzales-Day between the Getty Museum and the LAPD,” in Amelia Jones, ed., Ken Gonzales-Day: “Nevermade.” Reaktion, forthcoming in 2025

“Paper Routes,” in Print Matters: Photography in Print, edited by Andrés Mario Zervigón and Antonella Pelizzari. Getty Research Institute, forthcoming in 2025

“Municipal Law Enforcement and its Transmissions,” in “Policing,” eds., Jason Hill and Zeynep Gursel, special double issue of History of Photography 45.3-4 (2021 [December 2022]): 320-34

Artist as Reporter: Weegee, Ad Reinhardt, and the PM News Picture, 1940-1948 (Oakland: Univ. of California, 2018).

Getting the Picture:  The Visual Culture of the News, collection co-edited with Vanessa R. Schwartz (London: Bloomsbury, 2015).