Jerry Brotton

He is Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary University of London, a television and radio presenter and a curator.

Brotton writes about literature, history, material culture, trade, and east-west relations, particularly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

It wryly proposes that the dispersal of Charles I's art collection in 1649 was a democratic move, one that merits imitation in the contemporary world.

His 2016 book This Orient Isle: Elizabethan England and the Islamic World (London: Allen Lane, 2016) was serialised on BBC Radio 4 and won the Historical Writers Association Non-Fiction Crown (2017).

[1] Brotton collaborated as a curator and commentator with the artist and director of Factum Arte, Adam Lowe, in the exhibit Penelope’s Labour: Weaving Words and Images, at the Venice Biennale in 2011,[3] and in 2019 he and map librarian Nick Millea co-curated the exhibition Talking Maps at the Bodleian Library in Oxford.