Elsje van Kessel works on the viewing, use and display of early modern art. She completed her Ph.D. at Leiden University, the Netherlands (2011), and is the author of The Lives of Paintings: Presence, Agency and Likeness in Venetian Art of the Sixteenth-Century (De Gruyter, 2017). In this monograph, she examines how and why people in Titian’s Venice treated certain paintings and other works of art as living beings. She has received numerous fellowships, grants and awards: among others, from the Leverhulme Trust, the Centre Allemand d’Histoire de l’Art, the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.

Elsje’s current major research project is ‘Stolen Ships and Globalisation: Asian Material Culture in Europe c. 1600’. This project aims to study the circulation of Asian art objects between Portugal, England and Holland at the turn of the seventeenth century, in particular as a result of piracy and privateering.