Peter McNeil

Distinguished Professor Peter McNeil

  • Post Nominals: FAHA
  • Fellow Type: Fellow
  • Elected to the Academy: 2013
  • Section(s): History, Arts

Biography

Peter McNeil is Distinguished Professor of Design History at the University of Technology Sydney. McNeil trained in the History of Art with dissertations on interior design and fashion culture.

His many publications include the award-winning The Fashion History Reader: Global Perspectives, 2010 (Routledge; with G. Riello); Fashion: Critical and Primary Sources, Renaissance to the Present Day (4 Vols.), Berg, 2009; Luxury: A Rich History (OUP with G. Riello, 2016, Polish trans. 2017), Fashion Writing and Criticism and Fashion Journalism (with S. Miller, 2014, 2018).

Membre supplà ant, Comità International d’Histoire de l’Art (CIHA), he was Foundation Professor of Fashion Studies at Stockholm University 2008-2017, which did much to establish the dignity of the discipline in the European Humanities. McNeil was an Investigator in the Humanities in the European Research Area project ‘Fashioning the Early Modern: Creativity and Innovation in Europe, 1500-1800’ and was subsequently an Academy of Finland Distinguished Professor (FiDiPro) 2014-2018. Parts of his research engage with French culture and language.

He has curated exhibitions with the Sydney Jewish Museum (‘Dressing Sydney’) and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (‘Reigning Men’). His monograph Pretty Gentlemen: Macaroni Men and the Eighteenth-century Fashion World was published by Yale University Press in 2018 and has been praised in The New York Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement and Literary Review.

McNeil was awarded a UTS Human Rights Award in 2018 for his work on visual culture and LGBTQI communities.

Acknowledgement of Country

The Australian Academy of the Humanities recognises Australia’s First Nations Peoples as the traditional owners and custodians of this land, and their continuous connection to country, community and culture.