Dr Jacopo Gnisci

Jacopo is the Chair of the History of Art department’s Boards of Examiners and a Lecturer in the Art and Visual Cultures of the Global South as well as a and a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Africa, Oceania, and the America at the British Museum. He is currently the co-Principal Investigator the projects Demarginalizing medieval Africa: Images, texts, and identity in early Solomonic Ethiopia (1270-1527) (AHRC Grant Ref. no. AH/V002910/1; DFG Projektnummer 448410109). Formerly, he co-dicrected other projects including Material Migrations: Mamluk Metalwork across Afro-Eurasia (Gerda Henkel Stiftung). Jacopo sits on the editorial board of several journals for medieval and African studies including Gesta,  Aethiopica: International Journal of Ethiopian and Eritrean Studies, and the Rassegna di Studi Etiopici and currently serves as an Associate of the International Center of Medieval Art (ICMA). His research has also featured in the media, in newspapers such as the New York Times and the Evening Standard.  He has worked at Dallas Museum of Art and UT Dallas, the University of Hamburg, the Vatican Library, at the University of Oxford, and the British Museum. He has received several awards including a Getty/ACLS Fellowship and a gold medal from the Sheherazade Foundation. Jacopo has been carrying out fieldwork in East Africa for over 10 years.

Visit Jacopo’s RPS Profile for the most up to date information.

Research

Jacopo’s research focuses on the history of manuscript illustration, on the art and architecture of Ethiopia and Eritrea, and on the marginalization of African art in Western institutions. He has covered on a range of topics including the interconnections between art and the liturgy, the transmission and reconceptualization of visual culture through portable objects such as medieval manuscripts, and the relationship between text and image and the creation of sainlty images, the significance of materiality and space in religious contexts, repatriation, the representation of Africans in pre-modern Western art, and the intersection of racism and scholarship in the late ninteenth century. He has moreover published studies on the use, significance, and/or symbolism of icons, metalwork, and ecclesiastical vestments in Ethiopia, and has been the first author to have an article on East Africa published in The Art Bulletin. His research has featured in documentaries, magazines, such as the Pitt Rivers and Apollo magazines, and newspapers such as the New York Times. He has been involved in several exhibitions, including Africa and Byzantium (2023-24) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Peace, Power and Prestige: Metal Arts in Africa (2020) at the Harn Museum of Art and Languages of God: Sacred Scripts of Ethiopia and Eritrea (2019) at the Bodleian Libraries, which was co-curated with members of the Ethiopian and Eritrean diaspora. The latter exhibition was accompanied by the publication of the volume Treasures of Ethiopia and Eritrea in the Bodleian Library, Oxford (2019), which he edited.

Jacopo has been invited to talk at a wide range of institutions, including the University of Oxford, NYU, Dumbarton Oaks, Yale, The Musée du Louvre, Harvard, the University of Cambridge, and the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures.

Specialisms
Medieval art and architecture of Africa; Illuminated manuscripts; Ethiopian and Eritrean art.

Selected Publications

• Jacopo Gnisci et al. (eds.), A Handlist of The Manuscripts in the Institute of Ethiopian Studies, Volume One: The Gǝ’ǝz and Amharic Materials of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tradition, WipF and Stock 2025.
• Gnisci, Jacopo and qasis Abate Gobena. ‘Ethiopian Crosses: Art in Motion’. In Africa and Byzantium, edited by Andrea Achi. New York, NY: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, In press.
• Gnisci, Jacopo. “Ethiopia and Byzantium.” In Africa and Byzantium, edited by Andrea Achi. New York, NY: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, In press.
• Gnisci, Jacopo. “Royal Imagery and Devotional Spaces in Early Solomonic Ethiopia: The Case of Gännätä Maryam.” In Staging the Ruler’s Body, edited by Michele Bacci, Gohar Grigoryan, and Manuela Studer-Karlen, 113–31. Turnhout: Brepols, 2023.
• Gnisci, Jacopo. “Constructing Kingship in Early Solomonic Ethiopia: The David and Solomon Miniatures in the Juel-Jensen Psalter.” The Art Bulletin 102, no. 4 (2020): 7–36.
• Gnisci, Jacopo. “Christian Metalwork in Early Solomonic Ethiopia: Production, Function, and Symbolism.” In Peace, Power, and Prestige: Metal Arts in Africa, edited by Susan Cooksey, 254–65. Gainesville, FL: Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art, 2020.
• Gnisci, Jacopo. “Ecclesiastic Dress in Medieval Ethiopia: Preliminary Remarks on the Visual Evidence.” In The Hidden Life of Textiles in the Medieval and Early Modern Mediterranean: Contexts and Cross-Cultural Encounters in the Islamic, Latinate and Eastern Christian Worlds, edited by Nikolaos Vryzidis, 231–56. Turnhout: Brepols, 2020.
• Gnisci, Jacopo., ed. Treasures of Ethiopia and Eritrea in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Manar Al-Athar Monograph 5. Oxford: Manar al-Athar, University of Oxford, 2019.
• Gnisci, Jacopo. “The Looted Ethiopian Artefacts That Ended up in UK Museums.” Apollo Magazine, 2018.

Teaching and Supervision

Jacopo teaches courses on the late antique and medieval art of African and the Mediterranean world including HART0083 - Empires of Africa: Introduction to African Art & Archaeology, HART0193 - Demarginalizing ‘Medieval’ Africa: Challenges and Perspectives and HART0168 - Civilizations of the Book: The Global Middle Ages Through Illustrated Manuscripts. He welcomes expressions of interests from postgraduate students who wish to work on pre-modern illustrated manuscripts or African art. Potential applicants can contact Jacopo directly by email.

Current PhD Students:

Antonia Dalivalle: The Grand Detour: James Bruce of Kinnaird (1730-1794) and the Reception of Ethiopia in Enlightenment Europe, (second supervisor with Professor Margot Finn, FBA, History Department).

Contact

Office: 203, 20 Gordon Square.
Office hours: Thursday 14.00-15.00 and any other day of the week by appointment. Please email me about your intention to attend office hours to avoid any clashes with other meetings.
Email: j.gnisci@ucl.ac.uk