Professor Jill Burke

Professor of Renaissance Visual and Material Cultures; HCA Research Director

Biography

Background

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.

Undergraduate teaching

I supervise undergraduate dissertation students, contributing to first-year lectures and teaching third years in a Research Theories and Methods pathway on early modern recipes and reconstruction.

Postgraduate teaching

I supervise postgraduate dissertation students.

Open to PhD supervision enquiries?

Yes

Areas of interest for supervision

I currently have capacity to take on PhD students, and welcome discussions about potential topics. My areas for supervision are the following:

  • Renaissance and early modern visual and material culture (c. 1450-1650), especially Italian
  • Gender and the body, the nude, sexuality representation in medical texts
  • Body modification - tattoos, cosmetics, shaping the body through diet and exercise
  • Recipe texts, experimental history, reconstruction as a methodology
  • Renaissance art and curation, cultural heritage, national identity

Current PhD students supervised

Scarlett Butler - Feeling Fat: Experiencing and Treating Fatness in Early Modern France, 1515-1715

Stefania Vai - Lavinia Fontana in Rome

Yidan Liu - Michael Boym and the Agency of Cultural Translation between Early Modern Europe and the Southern Ming Dynasty (1644-1662) 

Past PhD students supervised

Pigi Sakellaropoulou - The petal and the brush: Gherardo Cibo’s ways of working with nature​

Carlo Scapecchi - Tapestry Making in Renaissance Florence (1545-1600)

Carol Taddeo - Antonio del Massaro (Il Pastura) and the Roman School 1478-1508

Tommaso Castaldi - Virtues and Vices. Communal art and secular art in Italy in the Late Middle Ages (1300-1450)

Mengxuan Sui - Diversity on Display: A Study on Gentry-Class Women and Their Painting Practice in the Jiangnan Region of High Qing China

Jacqueline Spicer - ‘A fare bella’: The Visual and Material Culture of Cosmetics in Renaissance Italy (1450-1540)

Irene Mariani - The Vespucci Family in Context: Art Patrons in Late Fifteenth-century Florence

Research summary

My latest book, How To Be A Renaissance Woman: The Untold History of Beauty and Female Creativity (Wellcome Collection, 2023) considers the history of beauty pressures and ideals, investigating how Renaissance women creatively reacted to a culture that put individual appearance under the spotlight. It was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week, a Waterstones Book of 2023 and a New York Times Book Editor's pick. It has generated media coverage globally, with features in La Repubblica (Italy), The Washington Post (US), El Pais (Spain) and the Telegraph and Guardian (UK) amongst others. It is translated into Spanish, Polish, Japanese and Simplified Chinese, as well as being recorded as an audiobook.

As part of this research, I collaborated with the soft-matter scientists Wilson Poon and Andreia Fonseca da Silva for the Royal Society-funded 'Renaissance Goo' project, where we reconstructed sixteenth-century cosmetic recipes. As well as several articles, this research resulted in an exhibition installation, 'The Beauty Sensorium' at the Wellcome Collection, London. This combined historical artefacts with contemporary art in a collaboration with artist/designers Baum and Leahy, to engage visitors' senses in the history of Renaissance cosmetics, and to highlight the impressive hands-on knowledge of the women who made them.

 

Current research interests

I continue to work on issues relating to cosmetics, beauty and the modification of the hair, face and body. I am currently co-editing a book on fatness in early modern Europe (with Holly Fletcher and Christine Ott), and finishing an article on cosmetic recipe texts and their readers. My next book will focus on Renaissance recipes and how reconstructing them can reveal hidden knowledge about the past, and also suggest ways to improve our lives in the present.

Past research interests

My previous project focussed on nakedness in art and life - resulting in The Italian Renaissance Nude (Yale University Press, 2018), a Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the year, as well as several articles and a co-curated exhibition, 'The Renaissance Nude' at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, and the Royal Academy, London (2018-19). I co-edited the catalogue of the same name with the show's chief curator, Thomas Kren and co-curator Stephen J. Campbell. My first experience on a curatorial team was with Patricia Allerston and Mal Burkinshaw, for the 'Beauty by Design' exhibition, which considered historical and contemporary attitudes to body image (Scottish National Portrait Gallery 2015, some travelling to Shanghai Museum of Textiles and Costume, 2018). Before this, I edited two books on early modern Rome (Art and Identity in Early Modern Rome, with Michael Bury, 2008; and Rethinking the High Renaissance, 2012). My first book, Changing Patrons: Social Identity and the Visual Arts in Renaissance Florence (Penn State University Press, 2004), was based on my PhD research.

Knowledge exchange

I now incorporate knowledge exchange in all my research particularly through curating and writing books intended for a broad audience. My work on the Renaissance Nude was an impact case study for the 2021 Research Excellence Framework.

Affiliated research centres

Past project grants

Royal Society Apex Award for the 'Renaissance Goo' project, with Prof Wilson Poon

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