Jonathan Hill came to St. Olaf in 1969 for a year and has stayed a lifetime. He was born and educated in England. He did his undergraduate and graduate work at Keble College, Oxford. He taught first in Ireland (University College, Dublin), and then in Sweden (University of Gothenburg). He spent 1978-79 on an NEH Fellowship in Residence for College Teachers in the Department of Art and Art History, at the University of California, Berkeley.
His principal teaching is in the British Romantic period, more broadly in 18th- and 19th-century literature, and in general literary topics appropriate to undergraduate, liberal arts education. A further specialty is contemporary West Indian literature; in this connection, he has regularly led an overseas January Interim to the Eastern Caribbean islands of Barbados, Trinidad, and St. Lucia.
His research and writing covers not only literature but the visual and graphic arts and the history of the book. He has published, in various venues, on Daniel Defoe, James Gillray, William Hone, Thomas Hood, Francis Jeffrey, Walter Savage Landor, Thomas Rowlandson, and the caricaturist and book illustrator, George Cruikshank. In addition to essays on Cruikshank, in 1992 he curated two exhibitions, one at the University of Minnesota, the second at the Rosenbach Museum and Library, Philadelphia, marking the two hundredth anniversary of Cruikshank's birth.
His interest in book history centers on the evolution of "books in boards" at the turn of the 18th and the 19th centuries. He has published two essays on the subject: "From Provisional to Permanent: Books in Boards 1790-1840," in the September 1999 issue of The Library (The Transactions of the [British] Bibliographical Society); and "Minerva at Aberdeen: A. K. Newman and Books in Boards," in Romantic Textualities: Literature and Print Culture, 1780-1840, 16 (Summer 2006) at http://www.cf.ac.uk/encap/romtext/articles/rt16_n02.html.
