Jerry Brotton author page

Jerry Brotton biography

Jerry Brotton is a British historian specialising in the Renaissance and cartography. He holds the title of Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary University of London.

He studied for a BA in English at the University of Sussex and an MA in the Sociology of Literature at the University of Essex. He later earned a PhD in early modern mapping at Queen Mary, under the supervision of Lisa Jardine.

Before joining Queen Mary, Brotton held a research fellowship at the University of Leeds and a lectureship at Royal Holloway. He returned to Queen Mary in 2003 and was appointed professor in 2007.

Brotton’s published works include The Renaissance Bazaar: From the Silk Road to Michelangelo (2002), The Sale of the Late King’s Goods: Charles I and His Art Collection (2006), and A History of the World in Twelve Maps (2012). The Sale of the Late King’s Goods was nominated for the Samuel Johnson Prize.

His 2016 book, This Orient Isle: Elizabethan England and the Islamic World, was broadcast as a BBC Radio 4 serial and won the Historical Writers Association Non-Fiction Crown in 2017.

In 2019, he co-curated the “Talking Maps” exhibition at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, and in 2024 published Four Points of the Compass: The Unexpected History of Direction.