Carola Margaret Hicks

Carola Hicks (7 November 1941 – 23 June 2010) was a British art historian. She was a pioneer in the field of biographies of objects, which is the exploration of the history of objects and the ways in which their reception has changed throughout time.

She was born Carola Brown in Bognor Regis, West Sussex, and educated at the Lady Eleanor Holles School and the University of Edinburgh, where she took a first in archaeology in 1964. Carola returned to Edinburgh and gained her PhD, in 1967, on "Origins of the animal style in English Romanesque art". Hicks worked at the British Museum researching the Sutton Hoo ship burial, before becoming a research fellow at Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, and then curator of the Stained Glass Museum at Ely Cathedral. She became a fellow at Newnham College, Cambridge, where she taught until her early death. Her book on the stained glass of King's College Chapel at Cambridge, was serialized as the Christmas book of the week on Radio 4 in 2007, by the BBC. The King's Glass: A Story of Tudor Power and Secret Art (2007), about the stained-glass windows of King's College Chapel Girl in a Green Gown: The History and Mystery of the Arnolfini Portrait (2011), about Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait. She died before the book was completed and it was finished by her Husband.