Robert Elgood
Robert Elgood has a BA in Islamic History from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), where he is now a Research Associate, and a DPhil from Oxford University in Indian Anthropology. He worked for some years in the 1980s as Sotheby’s Oriental arms expert and from 2007 to 2013, he was Research Fellow, Eastern European, Islamic and Asian Arms and Armour at the Wallace Collection in London. He catalogued the arms collection at Belmont House, Kent and wrote the arms section to a catalogue for Jodhpur’s exhibition at the Museum of Fine Art, Houston. He has lectured at SOAS on the Asian Arts Diploma since the 1980s, at seminars such as the ICOMAN Conference in Oman in 2012, in Cairo in 2014 and at many of the major museums of Europe, America, the Arab world and India including the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, the Metropolitan Museum, New York, The Islamic Art Museum, Qatar and the Dar al Athar al-Islamiyyah, Kuwait where he was a guest scholar. He has also advised museums, dealers and collectors. He is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and the Royal Asiatic Society. He commissioned and edited Islamic Arms and Armour and is the author of Arms and Armour of Arabia in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, Firearms of the Islamic World in the Tareq Rajab Museum, Kuwait, Hindu Arms and Ritual: Arms and Armour from India 1400-1865. Articles include three for Macmillan’s’ World Dictionary of Art and another for Brill’s Encyclopedia of Islam. In 2008, he wrote an introductory essay to a new edition of Sir Caspar Purdon Clarke’s Catalogue of the Collection of Indian Arms and Objects of Art at Marlborough House, originally published in 1898 and his Arms and Armour at Sandringham, published in 1910. ‘The Arms of Greece and her Balkan Neighbours in the Ottoman Period’ appeared in Greek and English editions. More recent publications are Arms and Armour at the Jaipur Court, his two volume catalogue, Rajput Arms and Armour: The Rathores and their Armoury in Jodhpur Fort and The Maharaja of Jodhpur’s Guns. You can read more about him and his work here.
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