Professor Geraldine Johnson

Geraldine Johnson is Head of Oxford’s History of Art Department and a Fellow (Official Student) of Christ Church. This is her second term as an Elected Member of Council. She has also served as Associate Head of the Humanities Division and at Christ Church has been Senior Censor (Academic Head), Junior Censor (Welfare Lead), and Tutor for Admissions. In 2009, she was awarded a University Teaching Prize for establishing Oxford's undergraduate degree in History of Art.

She has a BA in Comparative Literature from Yale, an MA in Art History from Cambridge, and a PhD in History of Art from Harvard. She has published widely on sculpture from the late medieval period to the present day, as well as on photography, the historiography of Art History, and women and the visual arts. At present, she has two edited volumes in press with Routledge and is completing a monograph on sculpture and photography for Reaktion Books. She has been awarded fellowships from the Harvard Society of Fellows, Leverhulme Trust, Henry Moore Foundation, Fulbright Commission, Mellon Foundation, and Harvard’s Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence. In 2025, she will be a Professeur Invitée at the Sorbonne (CNRS) in Paris. 

Outside of academia, she has served as a consultant for a Netflix series, Medici: Masters of Florence, and is the Chair of an Oxford-based charity that supports health, education and welfare projects in the Global South.