Kristin L. Huffman
Kristin L. Huffman is a Lecturing Fellow in the Department of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies at Duke University. Her current research focuses on the uses and configurations of space for the visual arts, the topic of her book project, Visual Rhetoric and Spatial Dynamics in Early Modern Venice. In it, she examines the intentional construction of visual systems with independent monuments, their alignment with urban spatial phenomena, and the deliberate ordering and presentation of knowledge and ideologies.
Her interest in lost urban experiences and reconstructing transformed or demolished spaces led her to work with Wired! at Duke as well as Visualizing Venice. For the latter, she contributed to the exhibition, Water and Food in Venice, at the Ducal Palace in 2015, and most recently curated the exhibition, A Portrait of Venice: Jacopo de’ Barbari’s View of 1500, presently on display at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke. She has recently organized this symposium, Stories about Venice and de’ Barbari’s Marvelous View of 1500, as part of a publication that will present scholarly essays together with the digital stories featured within the exhibition.
Tracy E. Cooper
Tracy E. Cooper (Ph.D., Princeton University) is Professor of Art History at Temple University in Philadelphia. Her specialization is Venetian and early modern cultural history, with particular interests in architecture-urbanism and patronage-network studies. She recently co-edited a volume with Marcia Hall on The Sensuous and the Counter-Reformation Church (Cambridge University Press, 2013). Her book, Palladio’s Venice: Architecture and Society in a Renaissance Republic (Yale University Press, 2006), received the Phyllis Goodhart Gordan Prize 2007 from the Renaissance Society of America.
Professor Cooper has acted in the capacity of department chair and director of graduate studies. She currently serves as an Art History Discipline Representative for the Renaissance Society of America and is on the Advisory Board of the Department of Art & Archaeology at Princeton and member of the Board of Directors of Save Venice, Inc. She received a Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation grant for research on her present book project: The Glass Bedroom: Family Dynamics and Cultural Agency in Early Modern Venice, a study of the life of objects over time in some of the leading families of Venice. She just contributed to the digital interactive exhibition, Merlo’s Map: The Religious Geography of Venice, part of interdisciplinary multimedia project Religious Change: 1450-1700, now up at the Newberry Library in Chicago.
Ludovica Galeazzo
Ludovica Galeazzo is an architectural and urban historian whose research focuses on Italian architecture of the Early Modern period. She is currently a Postdoc Associate in the Department of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies at Duke University where she has worked on the exhibition dedicated to Jacopo de’ Barbari’s View of Venice (1500). Author of several articles about the urban and architectural history of Venice, her to first book is in press with the Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti.
She received her Ph.D. in History of Arts at the Doctoral School Ca’ Foscari-Iuav in 2014 with a dissertation on the development of the insula dei Gesuiti in Venice from the second half of the 15th century to the end of the Venetian Republic. She has held research fellowships at the University Iuav of Venice for her involvement as assistant curator in two exhibitions at the Ducal Palace: Water and Food in Venice. Stories of the Lagoon and the City, and Venice, the Jews, and Europe. 1516-2016. During the last few years she has engaged with digital humanities, in particular the application of technologies (GIS system, geo-spatial mapping techniques, and 3D modeling) to urban history in order to explain the evolution of place and space over time. Since 2011 she is a member of the international research initiative Visualizing Venice.
Anna Swartwood House
Anna Swartwood House (Ph.D., Princeton University, 2011) is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of South Carolina. She teaches undergraduate courses on Renaissance and Baroque art, often from a global or cross-cultural perspective, as well as upper-level and graduate seminars on research specialties including artist’s biography, historiography, and Venice in its Golden Age. She has written extensively on subjects ranging from the sixteenth-century frescoed façade to the smile in Renaissance portraiture, and is currently completing a book on the painter Antonello da Messina (c. 1430-1479).
Holly Hurlburt
Holly Hurlburt earned her Ph.D. from Syracuse University in 2000 and is a full professor at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Her research focuses on women, gender, power, and identity in early modern Venice and the larger Mediterranean region. She has published two books: The Dogaressa of Venice, Wife and Icon (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), and Daughter of Venice: Caterina Corner, Queen of Cyprus and Woman of the Renaissance (Yale University Press, 2015). In 2007-08 she was the recipient of a year-long fellowship at Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Renaissance Studies. In March-April, 2017 she was a short-term fellow at the Center for Renaissance Studies at the Newberry Library in Chicago.
Blake de Maria
Blake de Maria holds the Harold and Edythe Toso Chair at Santa Clara University. She received her undergraduate degree from UCLA, where she specialized in Islamic Art, and then attended Princeton University where she continued her focus on the early modern Mediterranean. Her publications include the books, Becoming Venetian: Immigrants and the Arts in Early Modern Venice (Yale 2010) and Reflections on Renaissance Venice: Essays in Honor of Patricia Fortini Brown – which was awarded the Gladys Krieble Delmas Award by the Renaissance Society of America as well as essays on The Oracles of Leo the Wise and the material culture of dining in early modern Venice. She is currently completing the manuscript, “Facets of Splendour: Gemstones and Jewellery in the Republic of Venice.” In this study, she explores the mining, trade, and use of precious stones in a variety of venues, including the Treasury of San Marco in Venice.
Rachel McGarry
Rachel McGarry is an Associate Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, where she was worked since 2006. She earned a MA and PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, where she wrote her dissertation on The Young Guido Reni: The Artist in Bologna and Rome, 1575–1605 (2007). Previously she has worked at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Christie’s auction house in New York, and has also taught art history courses at the State University of New York, Stony Brook and the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. She recently completed a catalogue of Mia’s drawings collection, Master Drawings from the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, to accompany a related exhibition that traveled to the North Carolina Museum of Art. The show is currently on view at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha.
In 2010, she helped Mia acquire Jacopo de’ Barbari’s monumental, bird’s-eye View of Venice, a rare monumental Renaissance woodcut from 1500, and is currently organizing an exhibition around the work and artist, “Renaissance Mystery Artist Jacopo de’ Barbari.”
Monique O’Connell
Monique O’Connell is Professor of History at Wake Forest University, where she teaches courses on medieval and early modern Europe and on Renaissance Italy and is also chair of the department. Her first book, Men of Empire: Power and Negotiation in Venice’s Maritime State (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009) placed Venice’s overseas holdings into the larger debate on early modern empires and state formation, offering a new reading of how Venice successfully administered a wide swath of diverse territory for hundreds of years. Her second book, with Eric Dursteler, The Mediterranean World: From the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Napoleon (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016) offers an accessible and synthetic view of Mediterranean history. She is the project editor of Rulers of Venice (rulersofvenice.org), an electronic version of Venice’s medieval election registers. Her current research examines the methods and means of political communication in Renaissance Italy.
Giorgio Tagliaferro
Giorgio Tagliaferro is Associate Professor in Renaissance Art at the University of Warwick. His main field of interest is Italian, especially Venetian, art from 1400 to 1600.
He received his PhD in History of Art at the Università Ca’ Foscari in Venice (2004), where he also was lecturer (2004-10). He was visiting lecturer at the Charles University in Prague (2010, 2011), and research fellow at Warwick (2013). He also collaborated with the teaching program of the European Centre of the Emerson College of Boston, MA, based in Well, The Netherlands (2007-2013).
He has published on various aspects of Renaissance and Early-Modern Venetian art, with particular attention to: visual arts and the display of power; artists’ workshops; drawing and creative process; devotional practice and visual culture; patronage and artistic production. He led a team research project on Titian’s workshop, funded by the Fondazione Centro Studi Tiziano e Cadore (2004-09), and was the main author of the resulting book Le botteghe di Tiziano (Florence, 2009). He was a scholar in residence at the Getty Research Institute (2012), with a research project titled ‘Inside Paolo Veronese: Transformation of Ideas into Images’. He was the recipient of a British Academy Small Grant (2015-16), and of a Leverhulme Research Fellowship (2016-17). His current main projects are a book on the painted cycle of the Great Council and Scrutiny halls in the Doge’s Palace, Venice, and a study on art historian Leo Steinberg, the problem of looking at painting, and the art of Titian.
Saundra Weddle
Saundra Weddle is a professor of architectural history and theory at Drury University in Springfield, Missouri, and a Visiting Professor for Washington University in Saint Louis’s architecture program. Her research focuses on convent architecture in Renaissance Italy, particularly in Florence and Venice. Her current project, Architectures of Control and Resistance: Venetian Convents through the Early Modern Period, examines practices and patterns of convent foundation, patronage, and development; the influences of local architectural and urban vernaculars; and power dynamics related to Venetian social, political, and religious contexts. This research has received funding from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation and the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation. She is also collaborating with historian Daniel Bornstein on an Andrew Mellon Foundation-funded project, Technologies of Segregation in Italian Renaissance Cities, awarded through Washington University’s Divided City Initiative. Weddle’s contribution to the project compares convent architecture to other systems of segregation that responded to perceived threats to the desired equilibrium and found expression in architectural and urban forms. Institutional examples include the Jewish ghetto; fondachi; the public brothel; hospices for laywomen; and hospitals.
In addition to an edited and annotated translation of the chronicle of the Florentine convent of Le Murate (Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies, 2011), Weddle has published a number of articles on the form and function of convent architecture. Recent examples include “Suspect Places in Venetian Convents,” (Encountering the Renaissance: Celebrating Gary M. Radke and 50 years of the Syracuse University Graduate Program in Renaissance Art, WAPACC); and “Domus Humilis: The Conversion of Venetian Convent Architecture and Identity,” (Conversions: Gender and religious change in early modern Europe, University of Manchester Press).
Rangsook Yoon
Rangsook Yoon is an art historian and curator specialized in the print culture of early modern Europe, as well as German and French Renaissance art in general. She wrote her dissertation on Albrecht Dürer’s early career as printmaker and self-publisher at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and has published multiple scholarly essays on Dürer. Her article, “Distribution and Sales of Dürer’s Apocalypse,” appeared in Gutenberg Jahrbuch in 2010; “Dürer’s First Journey to Venice: Revisiting and Reframing the Old Question,” in New Studies on Old Masters in 2011; and “Dürer’s Unterweysung der Messung and the Geometric Construction of Alphabets,” in Visual Culture and Mathematics in the Early Modern Period in 2017. At the Cornell Fine Arts Museum in Winter Park, FL, she also curated exhibitions, such as Allure of Ancient Rome (2014) and Fashionable Portraits in Europe (2015). She is currently Director of Experiences at the Art & History Museums–Maitland, FL.
