About

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

Research topics

• Art
• Literature
• History
• Philosophy
• Visual arts
• Medicine
• Archaeology

Selected publications

• Room with a Few: Eduard Fraenkel and the Receptions of Reception

  De Gruyter eBooks · 2021 · 13 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Philosophy
  • Literature
  • Art
  DOI

• Beyond Eusebius: Prefatory Images and the Early Book

  De Gruyter eBooks · 2020 · 12 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Art
  • History
  • Archaeology

  This paper explores the genesis and functions of visually-conceived prefatory matter in the creation of the book in late antiquity. Beyond pragmatic use of prefaces to help guide readers through the new structure of the composite or collected set of texts, which is what a codex constitutes, the chapter examines the multiple interpretive impacts of various kinds of prefatory images as they resonate in the structure and reception of the early book. From the start, prefatory structures for the written codex included visual ornamentation: the kinds of framing needed to help readers find their way through this new kind of artefact intrinsically sought pictorial as well as textual cues.

  DOI

• Mutable, Flexible, Fluid: Papyrus Drawings for Textiles and Replication in Roman Art

  The Art Bulletin · 2020 · 6 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Art
  • Visual arts
  • Literature

  There is a relatively unexplored corpus of papyrus drawings made for and used by artisans engaged in the production of textiles in late Roman Egypt. The intentional indeterminacy in such sketches enabled both artistic flexibility and replicative (if not mass) production. An understanding of their employment in the fabrication of items both functional and decorative bears on far-reaching questions concerning replication, aesthetics, and artistic agency in Roman art generally, as well as on our understanding of the concept of the schema in the history of art.

  DOI

Frequent coauthors

• Rosemary A. Joyce

  9 shared

• Michael Squire

  9 shared

• Zainab Bahrani

  King Abdullah International Medical Research Center

  9 shared

• Jeremy Tanner

  University College London

  9 shared

• Wu Hung

  9 shared

• Simon Goldhill

  8 shared

• Verity Platt

  Atkins (United States)

  6 shared

• Froma I. Zeitlin

  5 shared

Labs

• Department of Art HistoryPI

Awards & honors

• Honorary Foreign Member of the American Academy of Arts and…
• Fellow of the British Academy (2017)

Similar researchers at University of Chicago

• Everett E. Vokesh-185
• Ian Fosterh-150
• Jack W. Szostakh-142
• Jean Decetyh-142
• Graeme Bellh-141