Robert D. Black


Robert D. Black is an Emeritus Professor of Renaissance History at the University of Leeds.
Black received a B.A. with honors from the University of Chicago in 1968, and a Ph.D. from the University of London in 1974. His doctoral supervisor was Nicolai Rubinstein. Black is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and an Honorary Fellow of the Società Toscana per la Storia Patria, of the Accademia Petrarca di Arezzo, and of the Società Storica Aretina. In 1992-1993, he was a Fellow of Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence, where he was a Robert Lehman Visiting Professor in 2014 and a member of the Selection Committee from 2012 to 2016. In 2013 his book Machiavelli was named a Book of the Year by The Times Literary Supplement. On 15 November 2019 Black was awarded the 'Premio Mario Salmi' by the Brigata Aretina degli Amici dei Monumenti, a society based in Arezzo and founded in 1906. The prize's citation refers to Black's 'studies and publications, the fruit of long and extensive archival research, which has contributed to a profound reinterpretation of educational and scholastic institutions in Arezzo during the late Middle Ages and the early Renaissance, as well as of political institutions in Arezzo and Florence in the fifteenth century, clarifying in depth the nature of the relations between the ruling power and the subject city , besides the complex interplay between politics and culture'.
Black is married to historian, Jane Black, author of Absolutism in Renaissance Milan. Plenitude of Power Under the Visconti and the Sforza, 1329-1535.

Selected publications