Adam Sammut is a historian of early modern art, with a particular interest in Flemish Baroque painting in its global and local architectural contexts. His current monograph project, Rubens and Islam, is conceived as a transnational, multimedia study of a canonical European artist, embracing cross-cultural contact with the geographies and peoples of North Africa, the Ottoman Levant, and Safavid Persia. In 2025, Adam won the inaugural Burlington Magazine Prize for Research on South Netherlandish Art for his shorter notice “Painting a prince of Tunis: Rubens’s ‘Mulay Ahmad’ reconsidered”.
Adam received his PhD from the University of York (2021). His dissertation, Rubens and the Dominican Church in Antwerp, was published in 2023 under the same title. Prior to joining the Courtauld, Adam was Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress, Washington DC (2018), Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of York (2021-24), and Rush H Kress Fellow at I Tatti: The Harvard University Centre for Italian Renaissance Studies. With Tomasz Grusiecki (Queen’s University Canada), he was the lead organiser of the British Academy Conference The Global Baroque: European Material Culture between Conquest, Trade and Mission, 1600–1750, hosted at York in 2025. Adam has contributed to several exhibitions, most recently 15 Mysteries of the Rosary at Het Noordbrabants Museum, Den Bosch.
Representing area studies on the Association for Low Countries Studies executive board, Adam is Honorary Visiting Fellow in the Department of History of Art at York, and Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (FRHistS).
Teaching
- BA1 Topic – Architecture and Identity: London’s Public Buildings; c. 1620 – c. 1820
- Histories Seminars: Artists, Radicals, Mystics: European Art, 1760–1830
- Critical Debates: Migrations
- Approaches: Monuments and Memory
- BA3 Special Option: Art and Empire in Eighteenth Century London
- Examining Exhibitions
Research interests
- Flemish art, 1500-1640
- British art, 1600-85
- Ottoman and Safavid art
- Early modern art in a global context
- Architecture
- Material culture studies
- Costume and textiles
- Cabinets of curiosities
- Environmental humanities
- Classical reception (Rome and Egypt)
Publications
Monographs
- Rubens and the Dominican Church in Antwerp: Art and Political Economy in an Age of Religious Conflict. Brill’s Studies on Art, Art History, and Intellectual History, 67. Leiden: Brill, 2023. Reviews: Barbara Uppenkamp, Renaissance Quarterly 78, no. 2 (2025), 554–55; Hans Vlieghe, Historians of Netherlandish Art Reviews (June 2025).
Articles
- “Painting a prince of Tunis: Rubens’s ‘Mulay Ahmad’ reconsidered”. Burlington Magazine 168, no. 1480 (July 2026): 699–703.
- “With a little help from his friends: Rubens and the acquisition of Caravaggio’s Rosary Madonna for the Dominican church in Antwerp”. Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art 70 (2020): 123–62.
- “Maarten van Heemskerck’s Eight Wonders of the Ancient World: Contesting the Image in an Age of Iconoclasm”. Dutch Crossing 46, no. 1 (2022): 27–49.
- “The Portraits of Scottish Kings at the Palace of Holyroodhouse Reconsidered”. Review of Scottish Culture 26 (2014): 123–31.
Book chapters
- “No More Heroes: Rubens, Tunis, and the Failures of Empire”. Habsburgs in Tunis. Edited by Avinoam Shalem and Alina Payne. Berlin: De Gruyter, forthcoming.
Exhibition catalogues
- Rubens, Van Dyck and the Splendour of Flemish Painting. Edited by Júlia Tátrai et al., 116–19, catalogue nos. 1–2. Budapest: Museum of Fine Arts, 2019.
Reviews
- Raffaella Morselli and Cecilia Paolini, eds., Rubens e la cultura italiana 1600–1608. Rome: Viella, 2020. Renaissance Quarterly 76, no. 2 (2023): 673–75.
- The Phoebus Foundation’s “Behind the Scenes” exhibition, St Paul’s church, Antwerp. Vidimus 138 (February 2022).