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

“Sacrifice and Narrative in the Arch of the Argentarii in Rome,” Journal of Roman Archaeology 18 (2005)

“Piety and Passion: Contest and Consensus in the Audiences for Early Christian Pilgrimage” in Pilgrimage in Greco-Roman and Early Christian Antiquity: Seeing the Gods, eds. J. Elsner and I. Rutherford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005)

Pilgrim Voices: Narrative and Authorship in Christian Pilgrimage, editor with Simon Coleman (Oxford: Berghahn, 2003)

The Verbal and the Visual: Cultures of Ekphrasis in Antiquity, editor, Ramus 31.1 & 2 (2002)

Pausanias: Travel and Memory in Roman Greece, editor with Susan E. Alcock and John Cherry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001)

Voyages and Visions: Reflections on the Cultural History of Travel, editor with J.P.Rubiés (London: Reaktion Books, 1999)

Art and Text in Roman Culture, editor (Cambridge, New York and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1996)

Reflections of Nero: History, Culture and Representation, editor with J.M. Masters, (London: Duckworth, and Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994)

The Cultures of Collecting, editor with Roger Cardinal (London: Reaktion Books, Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, and Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1994) Translated into Japanese (Tokyo: Kenkyusha, 1998)