Jaś Elsner

Biographic Data

ID3622952
NAMEJaś Elsner
GIVEN NAMESJaś
FAMILY NAMEElsner
SIGNATUREELSNER J
AFFILIATIONSCorpus Christi College
ORCID0000-0001-8535-7399
VERIFIEDNo
TOTAL WORKS88
TOTAL CITATIONS107
AUTHOR COUNT75
EDITOR COUNT12
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR1995
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2026
H-INDEX7

  • Festival athletics in the Imagines of the Elder Philostratus

    Jaś Elsner, Michael SquireCHAPTERThe Fabric of Hellenism2026

  • Material Religion in Byzantium and Beyond: Papers from the 54th Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies

    Ine Jacobs, Jaś Elsner et al.BOOKMaterial Religion in Byzantium…2025

  • Latin Literature and Material Culture

    Open AccessMichael Squire, Jaś ElsnerCHAPTERThe Cambridge Critical Guide to…2024

    This chapter introduces the rich intersections between Latin literature and Roman material culture. Why should Latin scholars concern themselves with ancient objects? How might study of Roman physical remains inform an understanding of Latin literature? In what ways do attitudes towards Roman material remains align with disciplinary approaches to interpreting Latin literature? The chapter proceeds in seven interconnected parts. The first examines…

  • The visual culture and the classics: An interview with Jas Elsner

    Open AccessJaś Elsner, Edjalma Nepomoceno PinaARTICLERomanitas - Revista de Estudos…2024

    Interview with Jas Elsner

  • The Cambridge Critical Guide to Latin Literature

    Open AccessIrene Peirano Garrison, Gavin Kelly et al.BOOKThe Cambridge Critical Guide to…2024

    The Cambridge Critical Guide to Latin Literature offers a critical overview of work on Latin literature. Where are we? How did we get here? Where to next? Fifteen commissioned chapters, along with an extensive introduction and Mary Beard's postscript, approach these questions from a range of angles. They aim not to codify the field, but to give snapshots of the discipline from different perspectives, and to offer provocations for future developme…

  • Making, replication, and quality in late antique art

    Open AccessJaś ElsnerARTICLERes: Anthropology and Aesthetics2024References: 13

  • Articulating Resistance

    Open AccessDaniel Jolowicz, Jaś ElsnerCHAPTERArticulating Resistance under the…2023

    In this introduction, we establish a framework for resistance studies as it relates to the ancient Mediterranean world, and especially to Rome as an imperial power. The first section explores the changing scope of resistance studies over the past century and how the three principal twentieth-century discussions of resistance by Classicists have been framed by Nazi Germany, the French colonial experience in Africa seen from the viewpoint of early …

  • Articulating Resistance under the Roman Empire

    Open AccessDaniel Jolowicz, Jaś ElsnerBOOKArticulating Resistance under the…2023

    This book explores the many strategies by which elite Greeks and Romans resisted the cultural and political hegemony of the Roman Empire in ways that avoided direct confrontation or simple warfare. By resistance is meant a range of responses including 'opposition', 'subversion', 'antagonism', 'dissent', and 'criticism' within a multiplicity of cultural forms from identity-assertion to polemic. Although largely focused on literary culture, its imp…

  • Iconoclasm

    Jaś ElsnerARTICLEWest 86th2022

  • Figurines. Figuration and The Sense of Scale

    Open AccessJaś ElsnerARTICLELes Carnets de l ACoSt2022

    This volume concerns figurines as archaeologically-attested materials from literate cultures with surviving documents that have no direct links of contiguity, appropriation, or influence in relation to each other

  • Landscape and Space: Comparative Perspectives from Chinese, Mesoamerican, Ancient Greek, and Roman Art

    Jaś ElsnerBOOKLandscape and Space2021

  • Classicism in Roman Art

    Jaś ElsnerCHAPTERClassical Pasts2021

  • Roman Eyes: Visuality and Subjectivity in Art and Text

    Jaś ElsnerBOOKRoman Eyes2021

  • Years of Dura Europos

    Open AccessJaś ElsnerARTICLEJournal of Roman Archaeology2021Cited by: 1References: 21

    It was more than 100 years ago, in March 1920, that British troops camping in the ruins of some unknown ancient fort on the Euphrates, named Al-Salihiyah in Arabic, during the skirmishing that followed the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the aftermath of the First World War, dug a trench and excavated some astonishing wall paintings. The officers in charge, along with the Civil Commissioner, managed to call in an American archaeologist who happ…

  • Other Worlds: Utopias in the Art of Late Ancient Eurasia

    Jaś ElsnerARTICLEWest 86th2021

    This article examines a profound contradiction inherent in the idea of utopia as conceptually formulated by Thomas More in the Renaissance and clearly implicit in pre-humanist utopian, Arcadian, or paradisal imagery and descriptions, reaching back via early Christianity to Greco-Roman antiquity and resonating equally within Asian Buddhism. The idea of utopia from Greek antiquity to ancient India has evoked an optimism not unconnected to the convi…

  • The Viennese Invention of Late Antiquity: Between Politics and Religion in the Forms of Late Roman Art

    Open AccessJaś ElsnerCHAPTEREmpires of Faith in Late Antiquity2020

    There is a very good case for supposing that not only the idea of late antique art, but indeed of late antiquity itself as a meaningful historical period, was invented in Vienna in the late nineteenth century. The ideological dynamics are significant, and help to explain the usual understanding of a temporal formulation (‘late antiquity’) to determine what is in fact a culturally and geographically specific designation – that is, a European-centr…

  • Empires of Faith in Late Antiquity: Histories of Art and Religion from India to Ireland

    Open AccessJaś ElsnerBOOKEmpires of Faith in Late Antiquity2020

    This book reveals the rewards of exploring the relationship between art and religion in the first millennium, and the particular problems of comparing the visual cultures of different emergent and established religions of the period in Eurasia - Buddhism, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, Islam, Judaism, Christianity and the pagan religions of the Roman world. Most of these became established and remained in play as what are called 'the world religions'.…

  • The Death of the Figurine: Reflections on an Abrahamic Abstention

    Jaś ElsnerCHAPTERFigurines2020

    This chapter explores an evidential absence, arising from a striking archaeological fact. In all the ancient cultures of the Mediterranean, including Egypt and north Africa, of the near East at least as far as India, both prehistoric and historic, from the earliest Palaeolithic to the end of pre-Abrahamic pagan polytheism in the western half of this vast geography spanning the Mediterranean and Asia, the figurine is a prime and ubiquitous product…

  • Figurines: Figuration and the Sense of Scale

    Jaś ElsnerBOOKFigurines2020

  • The Cross: History, Art and Controversy

    Jaś ElsnerARTICLEMaterial Religion2019

  • The Embodied Object: Recensions of the Dead on Roman Sarcophagi

    Open AccessJaś ElsnerARTICLEArt History2018Cited by: 2References: 2

    The Roman sarcophagus uses the visual forms of consolatory celebration to frame the actual body of the deceased.Its rhetorics of eulogy are not merely performative but are directly existential, since its form and function are entirely dependent on the act of containing a corpse.In sarcophagi, the frequency of portraiture as a major element of decoration adds a further frisson to the question of embodiment.This paper touches on all forms of portra…

  • Ark of Civilization: Refugee Scholars and Oxford University, 1930-1945

    Sally Crawford, Katharina Ulmschneider et al.BOOKArk of Civilization2017

  • Comparativism in Art History

    Jaś ElsnerBOOKComparativism in Art History2017

  • Images of Mithra

    Philippa Adrych, Robert Bracey et al.BOOKImages of Mithra2017Cited by: 7

    Images of Mithra begins with the seemingly simple question: what’s in a name? With a history of use extending back to Vedic texts of the second millennium BC, derivations of the name Mithra appear in the Roman Empire, across Sasanian Persia, and in the Kushan Empire of southern Afghanistan and northern India during the first millennium AD. Even today, this name has a place in Yazidi and Zoroastrian religion. But what connection have Mihr in Persi…

  • Homer and the Ekphrasists: Text and Picture in the Elder Philostratus’ ‘Scamander’ (Imagines I.1)

    Open AccessMichael Squire, Jaś Elsner et al.CHAPTERThe Archaeology of Greece and Rome2016

    In his seminal 1998 book, Homer and the Artists : Text and Picture in Early Greek Art , Anthony Snodgrass makes no mention of the Imagines , or indeed of its author, the Elder Philostratus. As Anthony would no doubt remind us, one would need have a very late (probably Byzantine) view of ‘Greek art’ to conceive of Philostratus alongside the word ‘early’. Yet the Imagines , written at around the beginning of the third century ad, provides one of th…