Dr Jan D. Cox received a first-class honours degree from Oxford Brookes University, where he was awarded the Jeanne Sheehy Memorial Prize. An MA from Bristol was followed by a PhD at Leeds investigating the impact of Nordic art in Europe in the 1880s. He has delivered conference papers in Britain, Scandinavia, Ireland, Italy, The Netherlands, Germany and Canada.

In 2017, Dr Cox was the major contributor to the exhibition catalogue Romanticism in the North – from Friedrich to Turner and has since published two book chapters on 19th century Danish art. He is the author of the University of Oxford short course The Impressionists: Painting Modern Life which he has tutored since its inception, and has taught for many years on 19th-century European art.