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

Jas' Elsner

Art and the Roman Viewer: The Transformation of Art from the Pagan World to Christianity

Cambridge University Press

1995

Jas' Elsner

Pilgrimage Past and Present: Sacred Travel and Sacred Space in the World Religions

with Simon Coleman, British Museum Press and Harvard University Press

1995

“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)

“The Rhetoric of Buildings in the De Aedificiis of Procopius,” in Art and Text in Byzantium, ed. E. James, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007)

“Philostratus Visualises the Tragic: Some Ekphrastic and Pictorial Receptions of Greek Tragedy in the Roman Era,” in Visualising the Tragic, eds. C. Kraus, H. Foley, S. Goldhill and J. Elsner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)

Ekphrasis, editor with Shadi Bartsch, Special Issue of Classical Philology 102, number 1 (January 2007)

“From Empirical Evidence to the Big Picture: Some Reflections on Riegl’s Concept of Kunstwollen,” Critical Inquiry 32.4 (Summer 2006)

Replications: Greece, Rome and Beyond, editor with Jennifer Trimble, special issue of Art History 29.2 (2006)

“Classicism in Roman Art,” in Classical Pasts: The Classical Traditions of Greece and Rome, ed. J. Porter (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2006)

“Reflections on the 'Greek Revolution': From Changes in Viewing to the Transformation of Subjectivity” in Rethinking Revolutions Through Ancient Greece, ed. S. Goldhill and R. Osborne (Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006)

“Perspectives in Art,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Constantine, ed. Noel Lensky (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006)

“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)