Empires of Faith in Late Antiquity

Jaś Elsner is Professor of Late Antique Art at the University of Oxford and Humfry Payne Senior Research Fellow in Classical Archaeology and Art at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He has been a Visiting Professor in Art History at the University of Chicago since 2003, and also at the Divinity School since 2014, and was Senior Research Keeper in the Empires of Faith Project on art and religion in Late Antiquity at the British Museum from 2013 to 2018. Since 2009 he has been an Honorary Foreign Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 2017 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. He works on art and its many receptions (including ritual, religion, pilgrimage, viewing, description, collecting) in antiquity and Byzantium, including into modernity, with strong interests in comparativism, global art history, and the critical historiography of the discipline.

1. Introduction Jaś Elsner; Part I. The Imperial Context: 2. The Gandharan problem Robert Bracey; 3. Writing the art, archaeology and religion of the Roman Mediterranean Philippa Adrych and Dominic Dalglish; 4. Mystery cult and material culture in the Graeco-Roman world Philippa Adrych and Dominic Dalglish; 5. The Viennese invention of late antiquity: between politics and religion in the forms of late Roman art Jaś Elsner; 6. The rise of Byzantine art and archaeology in late Imperial Russia Maria Lidova; 7. Ferdinand Piper's Monumentale Theologie (1867) and Schleiermacher's legacy: the attempted foundation of a Protestant theology of art Stefanie Lenk; Part II. After Imperialism: Orientalism and its Resistances; 8. The road from decadence: agendas and personal histories in the rise of early Islamic art Nadia Ali; 9. Connecting art and Zoroastrianism in Sasanian studies Rachel Wood; 10. 'Hindu' art and the primordial Śiva Robert Bracey; Part III. Post-colonialist, Old Colonialist and Nationalist Fantasies: 11. Jewish art: before and after the Jewish state (1948) Jesse Lockard and Jaś Elsner; 12. Whose history is it anyway? Contests for India's past in the twentieth century Robert Bracey; 13. Acculturated natives who rebel: revivalist, Ottomanist and Pan-Arabist engagements with early Islamic art (1876–1930s) Nadia Ali; 14. Barbarians at the British Museum: Anglo-Saxon art, race and religion Katherine Cross.