Jill Burke

I am a cultural and art historian, and occasional curator, with a research focus on Renaissance Italy. I'm interested in how human bodies (and the ways individuals think about, represent and modify their own and other's bodies) are affected by large-scale historical change. I'm currently also thinking about how we can understand history through the body, using reconstruction and other hands-on techniques in teaching and research.

I am the author of three books - How To Be A Renaissance Woman: The Untold History of Beauty and Female Creativity (2023), The Italian Renaissance Nude (2018) and Changing Patrons: Social Identity and the Visual Arts in Renaissance Florence (2004), and editor/co-editor of the following: Art and Identity in Early Modern Rome (2008), Rethinking the High Renaissance (2012) and Fatness in Early Modern Europe (forthcoming). I have also written many articles and exhibition catalogue essays. I have been on the curatorial team for exhibitions and installations at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, the Royal Academy, the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Wellcome Collection.

I grew up in Leeds, having some fabulous teachers at Benton Park School, who encouraged me to apply to Oxford University for a BA in History. Once there, I started to be fascinated about how we could understand the past through images and objects. For my postgraduate degrees, I switched to Art History, studying my MA and PhD at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. After teaching in London at the Courtauld Institute, Kent University and the Open University, I had a postdoctoral fellowship at the Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence. It was during this time I got as excited as it's possible to be in a library, when I discovered new documentation relating to Leonardo da Vinci and a robot lion on the back of a sixteenth century receipt. 

I came to Edinburgh in 2003 as a postdoctoral fellow for the Court Culture in Early Modern Rome project and never left, becoming a lecturer in History of Art in 2006, senior lecturer in 2010 (when I received a Philip Leverhulme Prize), then chair in 2019. I came home to History in 2024, moving from Edinburgh College of Art to the School of History, Classics and Archaeology.