Professor Jill Burke FBA

Summary

Professor Jill Burke is an art and cultural historian based in the History department at the University of Edinburgh. Born and brought up in Leeds, she read History at Trinity College, Oxford, before completing an MA and a PhD in History of Art at the Courtauld Institute, London. She then went to Florence for a postdoctoral fellowship at the Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies before taking up a post at Edinburgh, where she won the Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2009.

Her work focuses on Renaissance and early modern Italy. Her monographs challenge our understanding of Renaissance art patronage ('Changing Patrons', 2004), trace the beginnings and social understanding of the artistic nude ('The Italian Renaissance Nude', 2018, a Choice Outstanding Academic Title) and explore women’s responses to the era’s new focus on bodily beauty ('How to Be a Renaissance Woman', 2023, a Waterstones Book of the Year, BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week and New York Times Editors’ Pick).

She led the Royal Society-funded ‘Renaissance Goo’ project, working with soft-matter scientist Wilson Poon to investigate sixteenth-century cosmetic recipes. Alongside publications, the project generated ‘The Beauty Sensorium’, an installation created with artists Baum & Leahy and shown as part of the Cult of Beauty exhibitions in London (2023) and Barcelona (2026). She also co-curated 'Beauty by Design: Fashioning the Renaissance' at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery and Shanghai Museum of Textile and Costume (2014 and 2018) and The 'Renaissance Nude' (2018-19) in the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles and the Royal Academy, London.

In 2025, she co-founded the Edinburgh Centre for Historical Reconstruction Research and is director of the associated Historical Reconstruction Lab. In the same year, she was elected Senior Fellow of the Turin Humanities Project, which fosters postdoctoral research on historical and art historical topics through a global lens.