James Grantham Turner publishes extensively in literature and art history across the early modern period (1500-1800), in Britain, France and Italy: his most recent book The Villa Farnesina: Palace of Venus in Renaissance Rome (Cambridge University Press, 2022), won the PROSE Award for best art history title from the American Association of Publishers, and glowing reviews in Times Literary Supplement and New York Review of Books. Seven other books have appeared from Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge and Yale. His interests focus on sexuality and gender, but also reach out to landscape, ecology, food, comparative mythology and the influence of ancient Greece and Rome.
B.A. (1968), Cert.Ed., M.A., D.Phil. (1977) from Oxford University; taught at six British and US universities (Oxford, Sussex, Liverpool, Virginia, Northwestern, Michigan) before coming to Berkeley as Professor in 1990; currently holds the James D. Hart Chair. Fellowships include Guggenheim, NEH, and ACLS. 100-plus articles and review-essays, large and small, since 1963. Invited lectures include keynote address to the Milton Society of America (1994) and the Charles Mills Gayley Lecture in this department (2001). Has served on the advisory board of PMLA, Eighteenth-Century Studies, ELH and Restoration, and contributed to the exhibitions "Art and Love in Renaissance Italy" (2008) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, "Love: the Art of Emotion" (2017) at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, and "Giulio Romano: Arte e Desiderio" (2019) at the Palazzo Te, Mantua. In Spring 2013 he was Ailsa Mellon Bruce Visiting Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC. His book Eros Visible: Art, Sexuality and Antiquity in Renaissance Italy was published by Yale University Press in 2017. In January 2019 he presented his research as part of the exhibition The Renaissance Nude at the Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Recent work has gone global, with two chapters on erotic art and literature in the forthcoming Cambridge World History of Sexualities . Meanwhile, “Milton, Lucretius and the ‘Womb of Nature’” is forthcoming from the specialist journal Milton Studies and "Marvell as Miltonist" from Marvell Studies.