Ms Jill Harrison

Professional biography

Research interests:

Jill founded and is leading 2 research networks- the Trinity Network and the Adornes Network, which focus on the Trinity Collegiate Chapel in Edinburgh and the cultural influence of Anselm Adornes in Scotland and Europe. Following a programme of events and seminars the networks have a wide international academic membership and she is currently co-editing and contributing to 2 volumes, to be published by Brepols in 2025: Reviving the Trinity: Networks and Materialities in Scotland and Europe, 1400 -1600 and Anselm Adornes:Travel, Trade, Cultural Exchange and Intellectual Networks in Scotland, Bruges and Jeruslem. In 2023 she received a Jean Guild Award from the Old Edinburgh Club to support her two-year research project, Reviving the Trinity Stones, which will survey the fragments of medieaval stones from the Trinity Chapel, now dispersed thoughout Edinburgh. With Dr Rachel Delman she has co-authored an article for a special edition of the Royal Studies Journal (forthcoming) Reviving the Trinity: Making Mary of Guelders' 15th Century built legacy relevant in 21st -century Scotland.

In 2003 Jill completed an M.Phil at Newcastle University entitled An assessment of Giotto’s social and artistic enterprise: His influence on the first articulation of a theory of art and the changing status of the artist. Her subsequent research has focused on the political and economic aspects of Trecento Italian art with emphasis on Giotto’s lost secular schemes. She has recently broadened her interests into Northern European art and following an invitation to speak at the National Portrait Gallery on Hugo van der Goes’ Trinity Altarpiece she is preparing an article for a special edition of The Court Historian

Recent Conference Papers include:

2018 National Portrait Gallery, London. Invited speaker at a seminar in April convened by Dr Sara Ayres, Queen Margarethe II Carlsberg  Postdoctoral Fellow in Danish-British Portraiture, ‘ A pious and popular queen: A reassessment of Hugo Van der Goes’ portrait of Margaret of Denmark and Scotland’.

2017 Medieval Motion in Europe IV conference, The Middle Ages: A global Context, Lisbon, December.  ‘Pictured from Afar: Interrogating Giotto’s Global Encounters’

2016 Andrew Ladis Trecento Conference, Tulane University, New Orleans, November: Partisan politics and Giotto’s Ognissanti Madonna: making invisible allegiances visible’.

Rituals of Power –The Ceremonies of the Courts and States from the Late Medieval Period to the Modern Era, Warsaw, September: ‘Sovereignty, Politics and Performance: Giotto’s Secular Allegories of Power and Diplomacy in Angevin Naples’

2015  Association of Art Historians, UEA, Norwich, April: ‘Giotto’s family enterprise: money-making in the Mugello’. Renaissance Society of America, Humboldt University, Berlin, March: ‘Damned and Dishonoured: Giotto’s images of sacred and secular infamy’.

 ‘Giotto’s Circle’, Courtauld Institute, London, January: ‘Giotto in the Mugello’.

Recent panel convenor :

2016 panel co-convenor with Dr Joanne Anderson ( Warburg Institute) : AAH Edinburgh University: Artist Networks and Networking in and with Europe, 700 -170.

2015 panel co-convenor with Dr Vicky Ley ( Open University): AAH UEA Norwich: Artists, Avarice and Ambition in Europe, 1300 – 1600.

2012 panel co-convenor with Dr Sandra Cardarelli ( Aberdeen University): AAH Open University, Milton Keynes: Travelling Artists in Medieval and Renaissance Italy and Europe.

Memberships: Association of Art Historians, Giotto’s Circle (Courtauld Institute), Material Culture Research Group, Medieval and Early Modern Research Group, Renaissance Society of America, Society for Renaissance Studies, Ladis Trecento Forum.

Awards: 2011 Speller Award for a PhD research project ‘Giotto and the Cardinal: Art, Avarice and Ambition in Trecento Rome’ undertaken at the British School in Rome during December 2011.

Honorary Positions

 2016 Open University Art History Department Honorary Research Associate

Jill is currently tutoring The Renaissance Reconsidered, Exploring Art and Visual Culture and  Art and its Global Histories

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