Dr John Law is a graduate of the universities of St. Andrews and Oxford, and became a lecturer at Swansea in 1971. He was made a senior lecturer in 1989, and a Reader in 2002. For more than twenty years he has been a member of the Council of the Society for Renaissance Studies, and was a founding member of its Welsh branch; he edited Renaissance Studies between 1997 and 2006.

Dr Law became a corresponding member of the Deputazione Veneta di Storia Patria in 1981 and Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 1985. He is a member of MEMO, Swansea's Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Research.

Current research

Dr Law continues to pursue his longstanding research interests in the history of late-medieval and early Renaissance Italy, and is completing a monograph for Cambridge University Press entitled The Lordships of Medieval Italy. He is also working on a collaborative study of a description of the Venetian mainland state in the late-fifteenth century. As evidenced by several recent publications, Dr Law also has ongoing interests in the Victorian and Edwardian 'discovery' of medieval and Renaissance Italy.

Principal publications

Books

• (ed. with L. Østermark -Johansen), Victorian and Edwardian Responses to the Italian Renaissance ( Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005)
• (ed. with R. A. Griffiths), Rawdon Brown and the Anglo-Venetian Relationship (Stroud: Nonsuch Publishing, 2005)
• (ed. with C. Davies), The Renaissance and the Celtic Countries (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004)
• The Lords of Renaissance Italy, 3rd edition (Oxford: Davenant Press, 2002)
• Venice and the Veneto in the Early Renaissance (Aldershot: Variorum, 2000)
• (ed., with R. A. Griffiths), An introduction to the sources for the history of medicine in South Wales (Swansea: University of Wales SwanseaHistory Department, 1995)
• (with D. Hay), Italy in the Age of the Renaissance, 1380-1530 (London: Longman, 1989)

Book-chapters and journal articles

• ‘Guelfs and Ghibellines in Belluno c.1400’, in M. Gentile, ed., Guelfi e ghibellini nell’Italia del Rinascimento (Viella, Rome, 2005), 603-624
• ‘Victorian Britain and the Italian Renaissance’ in M. Fantoni, ed., Il Rinascimento Italiano e l’Europea: Storia e storiografia (Treviso: Fondazione Cassamarca, 2005), 547-562
• ‘John Addington Symonds and the Despots’, in J.E. Law and L. Østermark-Johansen, eds., Victorian and Edwardian Responses to the Italian Renaissance (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 145-163

Principal research awards, fellowships, and prizes

• Visiting Professor, Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, Villa I Tatti, Florence (1994-95)