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Leon E. Williams Professor of Art History
Italian Medieval & Renaissance
Ph.D. Harvard University, 1995
M.A. Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London
A.B. Princeton University
In addition to these courses, I teach specialized courses on Art & Gender, on Renaissance Portraiture, on Renaissance Mythologies and on the life and work of Sandro Botticelli. I also regularly lead both the department's senior seminar on Theory & Method in Art History and the department’s Foreign Study Program in Rome. Students interested in the Medieval and Renassance Studies concentration should feel free to come and speak with me.
Art history is a multifaceted project, which seeks to interpret the range of visual, spatial and tactile experiences we associate with the category ‘art’. It is this multi-sensory territory, and the range of historical materials it enables one to explore, that attracts me to the discipline. My research and teaching focus on fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italy, with an emphasis on the city-state of Florence. My work tends to be thematic and my publications include studies of the development of public political art, the material and visual culture of marriage, the social production of urban spaces, and configurations of masculinity in the visual arts. I am completing a book addressing gender and the experience of art in fifteenth-century Italy. My new research addresses Renaissance Hybridity, and explores the representation of transformations and intersections between humans, animals, plants, and inanimate objects. With Mark J. Williams, I edit a book series, Interfaces: Studies in Visual Culture (Dartmouth College Press/UPNE), which foregrounds the theoretical implications of new media on the study of visual culture. I currently serve on the International Advisory Board of the journal Art History, and am Associate Dean of the Faculty for the Arts and Humanities.
