Sean Roberts is a specialist in the arts of the pre-modern Mediterranean world. His research is concerned with the interactions between Europe and the Islamic lands, the cultural history of maps, and the place of printmaking in the histories of art and technology. He is the author of Printing a Mediterranean World: Florence, Constantinople and the Renaissance of Geography published by Harvard University Pres in 2013. He has co-edited the volumes Visual Cultures of Secrecy in Early Modern Europe first published in 2013 and now available from Penn State University Press, The Seas and the Mobility of Islamic Art (2021), and The Environment and Ecology in Islamic Art and Culture(2023), both published by Yale University Press.. Prior to joining the University of Tennessee as Senior Lecturer in the School of Art, Sean held the position of Associate Professor and Director of the Art History Program at Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar. From 2017 to 2019 he also served as President of the Italian Art Society, an international non-profit dedicated to the study of Italian art from prehistory to the present. As co-chair of the Hamad bin Khalifa symposium on Islamic art from 2017 to 2023 he organized the 2019 and 2021 meetings.
