Jas' Elsner

Biography

Jas' Elsner works on art and its many receptions (including ritual, religion, pilgrimage, viewing, description, collecting) in antiquity and Byzantium including into modernity. He has strong interests in comparativism, global art history and the critical historiography of the discipline. He is Professor of Late Antique Art at Oxford University and Humfry Payne Senior Research Fellow in Classical Art at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He was Senior Research Keeper in the Empires of Faith Project on art and religion in late antiquity, at the British Museum from 2013 to 2018. He has been a Visiting Professor in Art History at Chicago since 2003, and since 2014 also at the Divinity School. Since 2009 he has been an Honorary Foreign Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2017 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. He is currently a member of the overseeing committee of the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence. He was trained in Cambridge, Harvard, and London, before working at the Courtauld Institute and then Oxford.

Publications

The Ark of Civilization

Editor with Sally Crawford and Katharina Ulmschneider, Oxford University Press
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2017

The Poetics of Late Latin Literature

Editor with Jesús Hernandez Lobato, Oxford University Press
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2017

Art and Rhetoric in Roman Culture,

Editor with Michel Meyer, Cambridge University Press
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2014

Life, Death and Representation: Some New Work on Roman Sarcophagi

Editor with Janet Huskinson, De Gruyter
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2011

Saints: Faith at the Borders

Editor with Françoise Meltzer, University of Chicago Press
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2011

Roman Eyes: Visuality and Subjectivity in Art and Text 

Princeton University Press
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2007

Severan Culture

Editor with Stephen Harrison and Simon Swain, Cambridge University Press
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2007

Imperial Rome and Christian Triumph: The Art of the Roman Empire A.D. 100-450

Oxford University Press
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1998

Exiles and émigrés, libraries and image collections: the intellectual legacy, editor with Clare Hills, Art Libraries Journal 38.4 (2013)

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“The Genesis of Iconology,” co-authored with Katharina Lorenz, Critical Inquiry 38 (Spring 2012)

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Sarcophagi, editor with Wu Hung, RES 61/2 (2012)

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“Iconoclasm as Discourse: From Antiquity to Byzantium,” The Art Bulletin 94 (2012)

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Receptions of Pausanias: From Winckelmann to Frazer, editor, Classical Receptions Journal 2.2. (2010)

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“Art History as Ekphrasis,” Art History 33.1 (2010)

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Faith Without Borders: the Curious Category of the Saint, editor with Françoise Meltzer, Special issue of Critical Inquiry 35, No. 3 (Spring 2009)

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Philostratus, editor with Ewen Bowie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009)

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Images and Texts on the “Artemidorus Papyrus, editor with Kai Brodersen, Stuttgart (Franz Steiner Verlag: Historia Einzelschriften 214, 2009)

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“Physiognomics: Art and Text,” in Seeing the Face, Seeing the Soul: Polemon’s Physiognomy from Classical Antiquity to Medieval Islam, ed. S. Swain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)

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Profiles

Andrei Pop
Andrei Pop
Modern Art and Aesthetics
Department Chair
CWAC 162 | Tuesdays 1-2pm or by appointment.
773.702.0278
Niall Atkinson
Niall Atkinson
Medieval and Renaissance Architecture and Urban History
CWAC 260
773.702.0270
Wei-Cheng Lin
Wei-Cheng Lin
Chinese Art and Architecture
Architectural Studies Advisor
CWAC 268 | Office Hours: Wednesdays 9-10am and 12-1pm
773.702.0268
2006-07
Iowa State University
Assistant Professor, East Asian Art and Architecture
Potters Wheel
Richard Neer
Ancient Greek Art and Architecture
CWAC 259
773.702.5890
Megan Sullivan
Megan Sullivan
Modern and Contemporary Latin American Art
CWAC 272
773.702.5126