Professor Jerry Brotton, BA (Sussex) MA (Essex) PhD
Professor of Renaissance Studies
Tel: +44 (0)20 7882 8580
email: j.r.brotton@qmul.ac.uk
Research interests:
- Renaissance visual and material culture
- East-west cultural exchange, particularly Anglo-Islamic
- Shakespeare
- Early modern cartography and travel
Jerry Brotton’s research focuses on artistic, material and intellectual exchange between different cultures in the period 1500-1700. In 2006 he published The Sale of the Late King's Goods, a Leverhulme-funded study of the formation, dispersal and partial restitution of King Charles I's art collection, which was short-listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction (2006), as well as the THES Young Academic Author of the Year Award (2006) and the Hessel-Tiltmann Prize for History (2007). He has written books on early modern cartography and the construction of imperial space (Trading Territories), as well as collaborative work with Professor Lisa Jardine on artistic exchange between Christian and Islamic communities (Global Interests ). His book The Renaissance Bazaar (2002) was widely reviewed as a contribution to the growing understanding of the part Islam played in the European Renaissance. He has recently completed an AHRC-funded book on the mapping of the world from the Greeks to Google Earth, which will be published by Penguin Books in 2011. In 2010 he wrote and presented a three-part BBC television series on the history of maps, entitled Maps: Power, Plunder and Possession. He has reviewed for Radio 4’s Front Row, Radio 3’s Night Waves, The Sunday Times, The Sunday Telegraph, Literary Review and BBC History Magazine, and is a Trustee of the J.B. Harley Trust. He holds positions on several editorial and advisory boards, and in recent years he has been awarded fellowships by the Leverhulme Trust and the AHRC. He is also a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters. Jerry Brotton welcomes for PhD supervision students interested in undertaking research in all aspects of Renaissance literature, culture, and history, particularly in the areas of east-west travel and cultural exchange, geography, and Shakespeare.
Publications:
'The Renaissance Bazaar: From the Silk Road to Michelangelo' by Jerry Brotton
Recent Books
The Sale of the Late King's Goods: Charles I and his Art Collection (Macmillan, 2006)
The Renaissance: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2006)
The Renaissance Bazaar: From the Silk Road to Michelangelo (Oxford, 2002)
Global Interests: Renaissance Art between East and West, co-authored with Lisa Jardine (Reaktion and Cornell, 2000)
Trading Territories: Mapping the Early Modern World (Reaktion and Cornell, 1997)
Recent Articles
‘The Spanish acquisition of King Charles I’s art collection: the letters of Alonso de Cardenas, 1649-51’, Journal of the History of Collections, 20, 1 (2008), pp. 1-16 (co-authored with David McGrath).
‘Afterword’, in Andrew Hadfield and Matthew Dimmock (eds.), The Religions of the Book: Christian Perceptions, 1400-1600 (Palgrave, 2008), pp. 195-202.
‘From flower to foetus: the evolution of Marc Quinn’, in Marc Quinn: Evolution, exhibition catalogue (White Cube Gallery, 2008), pp. 3-7.
‘When Art meets History: The Sale of King Charles I’s Art Collection’, Historically Speaking: The Bulletin of the Historical Society, 8:6 (2006), 11-13
‘Buying the Renaissance: Prince Charles’s art purchases in Madrid, 1623’, in The Spanish Match: Prince Charles’s Journey to Madrid, 1623, ed by Alex Samson (Ashgate, London, 2006)
'The Sale of the Late King's Goods: Charles I and his Art Collection' by Jerry Brotton
‘Printing the Map, Making a Difference: Mapping the Cape of Good Hope, 1488-1652’, in Geography and Revolution, ed by David Livingstone and Charles Withers (Chicago University Press, 2006), pp 137-59
‘St George between East and West’, in Re-Orienting the Renaissance, ed by Gerald MacLean (Palgrave, 2005), pp 50-65
‘The Art of Restoration: King Charles II and the Restitution of the English Royal Art Collection’, The Court Historian, 10:2 (2005), 115-36