Thomas Hughes is an art historian and writer.

Thomas read English at Balliol College, where he was awarded the University’s Charles Oldham Shakespeare prize. After Oxford, he went to The Courtauld, where he did a PhD and remained to teach for some years. He was also the Brian Allen Scholar at the Yale Center for British Art in 2018.

Thomas has published widely on nineteenth-century art, art criticism and aesthetics, on figures including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Walter Pater, John Ruskin, J. M. W. Turner, and Marcel Proust. His work has particularly focused on queerness and representations of nature. He has also published on subjectivity and language in Michael Baxandall and T. J. Clark. (See Publications).