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 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 University Press, 1997), and editor of 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, 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. At present, she is completing a monograph for Reaktion Books, Photography and Sculpture, and she is also working on a second monograph, The Sound of Marble: The Materiality and Immateriality of Italian Renaissance Art. A co-edited volume, Photo Archives and the Place of Photography, will be published by Routledge in late 2024, and she is editing a field-defining collection of 30 essays, Art History Now: Theories, Methods, Approaches, which will be published in 2025 also by Routledge. Future projects include an historiographical study, Art History’s Images. 

 

She is a Series Editor for Amsterdam University Press’s Renaissance History, Art and Culture and a member of 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, and she is the Chair of an Oxford-based charity that supports projects in the Global South that focus on health, education and welfare.