John Richard "Jaś" Elsner, FBA (born 19 December 1962) is a British art historian and classicist, who is Professor of Late Antique Art in the Faculty of Classics at the University of Oxford (since 2014), Humfry Payne Senior Research Fellow in Classical Archaeology and Art at Corpus Christi College, Oxford (since 1999), and Visiting Professor of Art History at the University of Chicago (since 2003). He is mainly known for his work on Roman art, including Late Antiquity and Byzantine art, as well as the historiography of art history,^[2] and is a prolific writer on these and other topics. Elsner has been described as "one of the most well-known figures in the field of ancient art history, respected for his notable erudition, extensive range of interests and expertise, his continuing productivity, and above all, for the originality of his mind", and by Shadi Bartsch, a colleague at Chicago, as "the predominant contemporary scholar of the relationship between classical art and ancient subjectivity".^[3]

Early life and education

John Richard Elsner was born on 19 December 1962 in London, England.^[4] He studied Classics and art history at the universities of Cambridge, Harvard and London, with a doctorate at King's College, Cambridge completed in 1991.^[2] His doctoral thesis was titled "Art and the Roman viewer: the transformation of art from Augustus to Justinian".^[5]

Academic career

Elsner's doctorate was followed by a research fellowship at Jesus College, Cambridge. He then joined the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, where he was lecturer and then reader. He moved to Oxford University in 1999 as Humfry Payne Senior Research Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He has had visiting teaching positions at the British School at Rome, the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan, and Princeton University.^[2] Since 2014, he has been Professor of Late Antique Art at Oxford.^[4]

He is director of the Corpus Christi College Centre for the Study of Greek and Roman Antiquity,^[6] joint editor of the series of monographs "Greek Culture in the Roman World" for Cambridge University Press, and on the editorial boards of a number of journals.^[2] He is the project leader of "Empires of Faith", a five-year research project by the British Museum and the University of Oxford, "to understand the creation of religious iconographies and their relationships with state formation from the Mediterranean World to South Asia and the Borders of China, c. 200–800 AD".^[7]

Elsner describes his work as follows: "My main interest is the art of the Roman empire, broadly conceived to include late antiquity and the early middle ages including Byzantium as well as the pre-Christian Classical world. I began my researches by looking at the way art was viewed in antiquity – and this has led to an interest in all kinds of reception from ritual and pilgrimage in the case of religious art to the literary description of art (including the rhetorical technique known as ekphrasis) to the more recent collecting and display of art as well as its modern historiography and receptions. Since the art of antiquity has such a privileged, indeed canonical, position in our culture, the study of its receptions is an exploration of more recent history's varied, competing and often ideologically charged understandings of its own past."^[2]

Personal life

Jaś Elsner is married, and has four children.^[2]

Honours

In July 2017, Elsner was elected a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA), the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and social sciences.^[8]

Selected publications

References

External links

• Page at University of Chicago