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Personal History

Bill Kent was educated at Footscray and University High Schools in Melbourne and is an honours graduate in History of the University of Melbourne. Since obtaining his PhD from the University of London in 1971, he has taught at Monash University, which appointed him to a personal chair in 1989. A widely-published specialist in the cultural and social history of late medieval and Renaissance Italy, especially Florence, Kent has been several times a Visiting Scholar and Professor at the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence and was Christensen Visiting Fellow at St Catherine's College, Oxford, in 1990. He was Schouler Lecturer in History at the Johns Hopkins University in October 1999. Elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1982, Kent sits on a number of editorial boards and has been a member of the Advisory Board for Villa I Tatti.

In 2000, he was appointed founding Director of the Monash University Centre in Prato, a position he relinquished in November 2004, and in 2002 replaced Nicolai Rubinstein as General Editor of the edition of Lorenzo de' Medici's letters published under the auspices of the Warburg Institute, The Renaissance Society of America, Villa I Tatti and the Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento. He is preparing a biography of Lorenzo de' Medici and in 2004 published "Lorenzo de' Medici and the Art of Magnificence". From mid 2005, he has been an Australian Professorial Fellow in the School of Historical Studies at Monash.

Current Research

I am completing a biography of Lorenzo de' Medici commissioned by the University of California Press and to be submitted towards the end of 2008. I am also General Editor of the critical edition of Lorenzo de' Medici's letters, 13 volumes of which have already been published under the direction of the late Nicolai Rubinstein; when finished the series will comprise some twenty volumes.

I have recently co-authored with Carolyn James of this School a chapter on Renaissance friendship for the School's collaborative volume, Friendship: A History, to be published in late 2008. Another large project under way with Dr James and others is the study of letter-writing and epistolarity in Western Europe from the twelfth century until the present.

I have recently written the framing historical chapter for the "Cambridge Companion to Florentine Renaissance Art", to appear in 2009, and have co-edited with Ros Pesman and C. Troup, "Australians in Italy", to be published by the Monash ePress in August 2008.

Major Publications

I have published a large number of articles, essays and research notes on many aspects of Renaissance Italian civilisation. My books include:

Australians in Italy: Contemporary Lives and Impressions, ed. with R. Pesman and C. Troup, 2008.
Rituals, Images and Words: Varieties of Cultural Expression in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (ed. with C. Zika), 2005.
Lorenzo de' Medici and the Art of Magnificence, 2004.
Bartolomeo Cederni and His Friends (with G. Corti), 1991.
Patronage, Art, and Society in Renaissance Italy, ed. with P. Simons, 1987.
Neighbours and Neighbourhood in Renaissance Florence (with D.V. Kent), 1982.
A Florentine Patrician and his Palace (with four collaborators), 1981.
Household and Lineage in Renaissance Florence, 1977.

Refereed Articles
Renaissance Studies, Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Oxford, UK, 2006, pp. 383-398, 'Nicolai Rubinstein (1911-2002); Ruth Olitsky Rubinstein (1924-2002).

Areas of Research & Supervision

Italian Renaissance social and cultural history; art history; Florence in the time of Lorenzo de' Medici; Renaissance European history, including the history of letter-writing and friendship.

Teaching

Since mid 2005 I have held a research position in the School which precludes my teaching undergraduate courses. However, I am able and very willing to teach fourth-year special subjects.