Alison Brown is Emeritus Professor of History at Royal Holloway, University of London, having been a British Academy Exchange Fellow at the Newberry Library Chicago, and an Invited Visiting Professor and Fellow at the Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies at the Villa I Tatti Florence. She is the author of the biography Bartolomeo Scala 1430–97, Chancellor of Florence which won the Premio Arnolfo in Colle Val d'Elsa in 1979 and The Return of Lucretius to Renaissance Florence (2010).