Jaś Elsner

In July 2017, Elsner was elected a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA), the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and social sciences.

Elsner's doctorate was followed by a research fellowship at Jesus College, Cambridge. He then joined the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, where he was lecturer and then reader. He moved to Oxford University in 1999 as Humfry Payne Senior Research Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He has had visiting teaching positions at the British School at Rome, the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan, and Princeton University. Since 2014, he has been Professor of Late Antique Art at Oxford.

John Richard "Jaś" Elsner, FBA (born 19 December 1962) is a British art historian and classicist, who in 2013 was Humfry Payne Senior Research Fellow in Classical Archaeology and Art at the University of Oxford, based at Corpus Christi College (since 1999), and visiting professor of art history at the University of Chicago (since 2003). He is mainly known for his work on Roman art, including Late Antiquity and Byzantine art, as well as the historiography of art history, and is a prolific writer on these and other topics. Elsner has been described as "one of the most well-known figures in the field of ancient art history, respected for his notable erudition, extensive range of interests and expertise, his continuing productivity, and above all, for the originality of his mind", and by Shadi Bartsch, a colleague at Chicago, as "the predominant contemporary scholar of the relationship between classical art and ancient subjectivity".

John Richard Elsner was born on 19 December 1962 in London, England. He studied Classics and art history at the universities of Cambridge, Harvard and London, with a doctorate at King's College, Cambridge completed in 1991. His doctoral thesis was titled "Art and the Roman viewer: the transformation of art from Augustus to Justinian".