Dr. Sean Roberts’ research interests include the interactions of Europe and the Islamic lands, the cultural history of maps, and the place of printmaking in the histories of art and technology. His essays have appeared in journals including Renaissance Studies, Print Quarterly, The Journal of Early Modern History, and Material Culture Review. He is the author of Printing a Mediterranean World: Florence, Constantinople and the Renaissance of Geography(Harvard, 2013) and the co-editor of Visual Cultures of Secrecy in Early Modern Europe (Penn State, 2013), The Seas and the Mobility of Islamic Art (Yale, 2021), and The Environment, Ecology, and Islamic Art (Yale, 2023).

Prior to joining the University of Tennessee, 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. His latest project, a new biography of the Renaissance mapmaker Gerardus Mercator, is set to appear with Reaktion Books in late 2027.