Elsner, Jas (John R. Elsner)

PERSONAL:

Education: King's College, Cambridge University, B.A. (honors), 1985, Ph.D., 1990; Courtauld Institute of Art, M.A. (with distinction), 1987.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Ioannou Centre for Classical and Byzantine Studies, Oxford University, 66 St. Giles, Oxford OX1 3LU, England. E-mail—jas.elsner@ccc.ox.ac.uk.

CAREER:

Classics scholar. Jesus College, Cambridge University, Cambridge, England, junior research fellow, 1990-91; Courtauld Institute of Art, London, England, lecturer in classical and early Christian art, 1991-98, coordinator of master's program in art museum studies, 1993-96, reader in history of art, 1998-99; Corpus Christi College, Oxford University, Oxford, England, Humfry Payne senior research fellow in classical archaeology, 1999—; École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, visiting professor, 1999-2000; Institute for the Humanities, University of Michigan, visiting fellow and visiting professor, 2000; University of Chicago, visiting professor of art history, 2003—.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Frank Knox Memorial fellowship, teaching fellowship in ancient history and art history, both 1985, both Harvard University; Baynes Prize, 1988; Hellenic Foundation Sixth Annual Award, 1992; Hare Prize, 1993; Hugh Last fellowship, 1997, British School at Rome.

WRITINGS:

(Editor, with Jamie Masters) Reflections of Nero: Culture, History, and Representation, University of North Carolina Press (Chapel Hill, NC), 1994.

Art and the Roman Viewer: The Transformation of Art from the Pagan World to Christianity ("Cambridge Studies in New Art History and Criticism" series), Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 1995.

(Editor) Art and Text in Roman Culture ("Cambridge Studies in New Art History and Criticism" series), Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 1996.

(Editor, with Joan-Pau Rubies) Voyages and Visions: Towards a Cultural History of Travel, Reaktion Books (London, England), 1998.

Imperial Rome and Christian Triumph: The Art of the Roman Empire AD 100-450 ("Oxford History of Art" series), Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1998.

(Editor and translator, with Thupten Jinpa) Songs of Spiritual Experience: Tibetan Buddhist Poems of Insight and Awakening, Shambhala (Boston, MA), 2000.

(Editor, with Susan E. Alcock and John F. Cherry) Pausanias: Travel and Memory in Roman Greece, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2001.

(Editor, with Ian Rutherford) Pilgrimage in Graeco-Roman and Early Christian Antiquity: Seeing the Gods, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2005.

Roman Eyes: Visuality and Subjectivity in Art and Text, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 2007.

Contributor to books, including Art and Text in Ancient Greek Culture, edited by S. Goldhill and R. Osborne, Cambridge University Press (Cambridge, England), 1994; The Roman Empire in the East, edited by S.E. Alcock, Oxbow Books (Oxford, England), 1997; and Being Greek under Rome: Cultural Identity, the Second Sophistic and the Development of Empire, edited by S. Goldhill, Cambridge University Press (Cambridge, England), 2001. Contributor to periodicals, including Art History, Journal of Hellenic Studies, Classical Quarterly, Omnibus, and Journal of Roman Studies.

SIDELIGHTS:

Historian Jas Elsner specializes in classical and early Christian art. In Art and the Roman Viewer: The Transformation of Art from the Pagan World to Christianity, Elsner attempts "to understand the shift in the meaning of art during a pivotal period in western art, late antiquity, when abstraction replaced naturalism as the dominant artistic mode throughout the Mediterranean," explained Elizabeth Bartman in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review Online. "Whereas others have explained the shift in terms of economics, ethnicity, religion, or artistic enfeeblement, Elsner points to a change in the prevailing mode of viewing as the impetus." According to Antiquity reviewer Dominic Janes, the author "sweeps from case-study to case-study, each of which aims to illustrate his core thesis that ancient viewing was a subtle and complex process. He argues that the transition over time is not so much from materiality to spirituality, as in a falling away of irony and the rise of an austere seriousness of purpose in the minds of the audience for art." Though Bartman criticized some aspects of Elsner's scholarship, she noted that he "does succeed in showing how ancient Romans perceived art and their world in multiple, sometimes contradictory, modes. Compared with art historians whose work centers on the post-antique, those who specialize in ancient art have been slow to embrace new methodologies suggested by related fields of his- tory, linguistics, and anthropology. Elsner's boldness lies in [his] willingness to apply new approaches to the visual evidence from antiquity." Thomas Jacoby, writing on the Art Libraries Society of North America Web site, stated that the work "is a valuable contribution to an ongoing art historical debate and provides the reader with many compelling new insights into the transformation from classical illusionism to late antique abstraction."

Elsner served as editor of Art and Text in Roman Culture, a collection of ten essays concerning the debate on the history of Roman art. In the Bryn Mawr Classical Review Online, Christina S. Kraus remarked that the contributors to Elsner's work, "many of whom are literary scholars, have suggested ways in which Roman literary history might proceed. In a sense, there is not much new here: as in the seemingly endless debate between ‘philology’ and ‘theory,’ art historians, archaeologists, historians, and literary critics have all known for some time that each field is essential to the other. But to see scholars actually engaging in interdisciplinary dialogue without polemic or artificiality (‘pick a theory and illustrate it’) is welcome." In Imperial Rome and Christian Triumph: The Art of the Roman Empire AD 100-450, Elsner examines developments in the arts of the Roman Empire through the time of its conversion to Christianity. Church History contributor Elizabeth C. Parker called the work "an important resource not only for understanding the roots of early Christian art within the traditions of imperial Rome, but also for appreciating the source of themes that will recur in later medieval art as well—such issues as divine kingship, the reception of icons, and the ongoing penchant for using the past to validate the present."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Antiquity, September, 1996, Dominic Janes, review of Art and the Roman Viewer: The Transformation of Art from the Pagan World to Christianity, p. 711.

Church History, June, 1997, Frederick W. Norris, review of Art and the Roman Viewer, pp. 320-322; March, 1998, Annabel Wharton, review of Art and Text in Roman Culture, p. 114; September, 2000, Elizabeth C. Parker, review of Imperial Rome and Christian Triumph: The Art of the Roman Empire AD 100-450, pp. 643-644.

Classical Review, February, 1995, D. Wardle, review of Reflections of Nero: Culture, History, and Representation, pp. 345-347; January, 2000, Glenys Davies, review of Imperial Rome and Christian Triumph, pp. 241-243; February, 2001, Liz James, review of Art and Text in Roman Culture, pp. 452-453.

English Historical Review, November, 1997, Martin Henig, review of Art and the Roman Viewer, p. 1224.

Greece & Rome, October, 1994, Thomas Wiedemann, review of Reflections of Nero, p. 235; October, 1999, Nigel Spivey, review of Imperial Rome and Christian Triumph, pp. 249-251.

Journal of Historical Geography, April, 2001, Peter Bishop, review of Voyages and Visions: Towards a Cultural History of Travel, pp. 275-277.

Library Journal, February 15, 1999, Mary Morgan Smith, review of Imperial Rome and Christian Triumph, p. 146; May, 1999, Kathleen A. Shanahan, review of Voyages and Visions, p. 100; January 1, 2001, Graham Christian, review of Songs of Spiritual Experience: Tibetan Buddhist Poems of Insight and Awakening, p. 118.

London Review of Books, April 28, 1994, James Davidson, review of Reflections of Nero, pp. 22-23.

Mnemosyne, April, 1999, Eric M. Moormann, review of Art and Text in Roman Culture, pp. 249-252.

Religious Studies Review, July, 1999, T.H. Carpenter, review of Art and the Roman Viewer, p. 293.

Times Higher Education Supplement, June 4, 1999, Nigel Barley, review of Voyages and Visions, pp. 23-24.

Times Literary Supplement, March 3, 1995, Miriam Griffin, review of Reflections of Nero, p. 25; July 5, 1996, R.L. Gordon, review of Art and the Roman Viewer, p. 27; April 19, 2002, Jane Lightfoot, review of Pausanias: Travel and Memory in Roman Greece, p. 9.

Washington Post Book World, June 6, 1999, James Conaway, review of Voyages and Visions, p. 3.

ONLINE

Art Libraries Society of North America Web site,http://www.arlisna.org/ (April 18, 2007), Thomas Jacoby, review of Art and the Roman Viewer.

Bryn Mawr Classical Review Online, http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/bmcr/ (April 18, 2007), Elizabeth Bart- man, review of Art and the Roman Viewer; and Christina S. Kraus, review of Art and Text in Roman Culture.

CAA Reviews,http://www.caareviews.org/ (September 14, 2004), Robert S. Nelson, review of Art and the Roman Viewer.

University of Chicago Web site,http://www.uchicago.edu/ (March 30, 2007), "Jas Elsner."