Professor Geraldine A. Johnson
Geraldine Johnson received a BA in Comparative Literature from Yale, an MA in Art History from Cambridge, and a PhD in History of Art from Harvard. She has been awarded a number of prestigious grants and fellowships, including from the Harvard Society of Fellows, Leverhulme Trust, Henry Moore Foundation, Fulbright Commission, Mellon Foundation, and Harvard’s Center for Italian Renaissance Studies at Villa i Tatti in Florence. She will be a Visiting Professor (Professeur Invitée) in 2025 at the Sorbonne’s Centre André Chastel (CNRS) in Paris. She is currently Head of Oxford’s History of Art Department and an Elected Member of the University's Governing Council. She has also served as Associate Head of Oxford’s Humanities Division and has held a number of senior positions at her Oxford college (Christ Church), including Senior Censor (Academic Head and Co-Deputy Head of College), Junior Censor (oversight of welfare), and Tutor for Admissions. In 2009, she received a University Teaching Prize for her work in establishing Oxford's undergraduate degree in History of Art.
She has published widely on the history of sculpture from the late medieval period to the present day, as well as on the visual arts more generally in Early Modern Europe. Her research interests also include the history of photography, the historiography of Art History, and women and the visual arts.
She is the co-editor of a prize-winning volume, Picturing Women in Renaissance and Baroque Italy (Cambridge Univesrity Press, 1997), and editor of a ground-breaking collection, Sculpture and Photography: Envisioning the Third Dimension (Cambridge University Press, 1998). Oxford University Press published her Very Short Introduction to Renaissance Art in 2005, with a new edition appearing in 2010 from an imprint of Barnes & Noble. It has been translated into Chinese, Greek, Romanian, Turkish, Thai, and Vietnamese, with a second edition currently in progress. Her articles have appeared in major peer-reviewed journals including Art History, The Art Bulletin, Renaissance Quarterly, and The Sculpture Journal.
Most recently, her co-edited volume, Photo Archives and the Place of Photography, was published by Routledge in 2025. Another edited volume, a field-defining collection of 30 essays entitled Art History Now: Theories, Methods, Approaches, is currently in press, also with Routledge. At present, she is completing a monograph for Reaktion Books, Photography and Sculpture, and she is also working on another monograph, The Sound of Marble: The Materiality and Immateriality of Italian Renaissance Art. With Dr Leah Clark, she is co-curating a major exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum entitled Sensory Worlds of the Global Renaissance, which will open in 2027.
She is on the Editorial Board of Amsterdam University Press’s Renaissance History, Art and Culture series and she has recently completed a stint on the Editorial Board of Art History, one of the leading journals in the field. She has also served as a consultant for a major Anglo-Italian television series, Medici: Masters of Florence (Series 2 & 3), which was distributed by Netflix and broadcast on five continents. Beyond her academic interests, she is the Chair of an Oxford-based charity that supports projects in the Global South focusing on health, education and welfare.
