Seminar Leaders:
Susanna Berger, USC
Daniela Bleichmar, USC
Vittoria DiPalma, USC
Lisa Pon, USC
Amy Powell, USC
2022-2023
Friday, April 14, 2023
“Women in the Making of Early Modern Art and Science”
Organizers
Daniela Bleichmar, USC
Nicole LaBouff, Minneapolis Institute of Art
Nina Gelbart, Occidental College
“Minerva’s French Sisters: Women of Science in Enlightenment France”
Paula Findlen, Stanford University
“Artisans of Nature: Gender, Knowledge, and Representation since the Renaissance”
Jessica Rosenberg, University of Miami
“The feminine arts of redistribution: herbs, poems, and slips in Elizabethan England”
Anne Secord, University of Cambridge
“‘my trembling hand’: Ellen Hutchins’s self-education in botanical art”
Claudia Swan, Washington University in St. Louis
“Threading the Needle: Women and Natural History in the Dutch Republic”
University of Southern California
2021-2022
Friday, May 6, 2022
“Currency, Capital, Coin”
Organizers
Vittoria di Palma, USC
Amy Powell, USC
Participants
Karwan Fatah-Black, Universiteit Leiden
Lauren Jacobi, MIT
Jennifer Morgan, NYU
Rebecca Spang, Indiana University, Bloomington
Allison Stielau, University College London
Online
2020-2021
Friday, October 2, 2020
Reimagining the Museum: “Difficult” Objects
Organizers
Daniela Bleichmar, University of Southern California, Departments of Art History and History
Nancy Lutkehaus, University of Southern California, Department of Anthropology
Participants
Dennis Carr, Huntington Art Museum
Joshua Garrett-Davis, The Autry Museum of the American West
Rebecca Hall, USC Pacific Asia Museum
Laurel Kendall, American Museum of Natural History
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, NYU / Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews
Kailani Polzak, University of California, Santa Cruz
Matthew Robb, Fowler Museum at UCLA
Nancy Um, SUNY Binghamton
Winnie Wong, University of California, Berkeley
Online
2019-2020
Wednesday, September 25, 2019
Joseph Monteyne, University of British Columbia
“Making and Unmaking the Paper World: Dark Media and Graphic Performance in Late Georgian Britain”
University of Southern California
Wednesday, November 20, 2019
Carolyn Yerkes, Princeton University
“Piranesi Works”
University of Southern California
Friday & Saturday, April 17 & 18, 2020
Big Paper: Large Designs in the Renaissance
Cancelled due to Covid
2018-2019
Thursday, September 20, 2018
Bronwen Wilson, University of California, Los Angeles
“Perspective, the Horizon, and the Human Compass: On the Phenomenology of Conversion and some Early Modern Mediterranean Travel Images”
University of Southern California
Wednesday, November 7, 2018
Walter Melion, Emory College
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph as Artisans of the Heart and Soul in Manuscript MPM R 35 Vita S. Iosephi beatissimae Virginis sponsi of ca. 1600”
University of Southern California
Wednesday, January 30, 2019
Elizabeth Honig, University of California, Berkeley
“Lodging Dwelling Painting: Place and the Placeless in Early Modern England”
University of Southern California
Monday, April 22, 2019
Surekha Davies, John Carter Brown Library
“Curiosity Cabinets in Early Modern Europe: Spaces of Disruption”
Huntington Library
2017-2018
Monday, February 26, 2018
Robert Wellington, Australian National University
“Onontio’s Reward: When Louis XIV’s Head Hung from Native American Necks”
University of Southern California
2016-2017
Monday, February 6, 2017
“Visual History: The Past in Pictures: The 16th and 17th Centuries”
Evonne Levy, University of Toronto
“The Council of Trent in Images: Subjects, Audiences, and Intermediality”
Peter Miller, Bard Graduate Center
“Antiquarianism and Its Images”
Christopher Wood, New York University
“The Referential Image”
University of Southern California
2015-2016
Wednesday, September 30, 2015
William H. Sherman, Victoria and Albert Museum
“Decoding the Renaissance: 500 Years of Codes and Ciphers”
University of Southern California
Wednesday, October 14, 2015
Susan Dackerman, Harvard Art Museums and Getty Research Institute
“Dürer’s Prints and the Mobility of Knowledge”
University of Southern California
Wednesday, November 18, 2015
Cécile Fromont, University of Chicago
“Envisioning Cross-Cultural Knowledge: Capuchin Images of Early Modern Kongo and Angola”
University of Southern California
2014-2015
Thursday, September 18, 2014
Depicting Spanish American Nature
Alejandra Rojas-Silva, Ph.D. Candidate, Harvard University
“A New Nature: Colonial Subjectivity in Sixteenth Century Botanical Illustrations”
Valeria A. Lopez Fadul, Ph.D. Candidate, Princeton University
“Francisco Hernández and the Project of a Universal Natural History (1560-1587)”
Alicia Lubowski-Jahn, Independent Curator
“Alexander von Humboldt and The Tropical American Landscape: The Intertwining of Pictorial
Representation and Humboldt’s Science”
University of Southern California
Co-sponsored with the USC Visual Studies Research Institute.
Friday, March 27, 2015
Sandra Rebok, The Huntington Library/ Spanish National Research Council
“Between art and sciences: Alexander von Humboldt and the visual representation of American nature”
Huntington Library
2013-2014
Thursday, October 24, 2013
Clara Bargellini, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
“Engraving and Empire in Spanish America”
Getty Center
2012-2013
Wednesday, October 31, 2012
Model Lives: Saintly Anatomy, Moving Automata, and Ideal Societies in Early Modern Europe
Bradford Bouley, Provost’s Postdoctoral Scholar, USC History
“You Gotta Have Guts: Anatomy as Proof of Sanctity in Early Modern Europe”
Jessica Keating, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Early Modern Visual Culture, USC Art History
“Empire on the Move: Early Modern German Automata”
Julianne Werlin, Provost’s Postdoctoral Scholar, USC English
“Francis Bacon and the Misinterpretation of Reality”
USC
Saturday, February 2, 2013
Proving the Supernatural: Belief and Nature in Early Modern Europe
Organizer: Bradford Bouley, University of Southern California
Bradford Bouley, USC
“The Most Difficult Diagnosis: Debating the Supernatural in the Republic of Letters”
A. Katie Harris, UC Davis
“Proving Sanctity: Experimentation and Authentication of Relics in the Early Modern Mediterranean”
Jonathan Seitz, Drexel University
“The Exorcist as Expert”
Lydia Barnett, University of Michigan
“Putting the Natural in Natural History”
Huntington Library
Friday, February 8, 2013
Animals and Anthropocentrism in the Early Modern World
Organizer: Jessica Keating, University of Southern California
Katie Chenoweth, Washington and Lee University
“The Beast, the Sovereign, and the Letter: The Posthumanist French of François Ier”
Holly Dugan, George Washington University
“To Bark with Judgment: Playing Baboon in Early Modern London”
Christina Normore, Northwestern University
“Aping Courtiers in Valois Burgundy”
Zeb Tortorici, New York University
“Archival Animals: Species and Colonialism in New Spain”
Huntington Library
2010-2011
Saturday, October 30. 2010
Global Visions: Material Exchanges in the Early Modern World
Sven Dupre, University of Ghent
“The Collection of the Portuguese Merchant-Banker Emmanuel Ximenes: Global Trade, Local Exchanges, and Knowledge in Early 17th-Century Antwerp”
Mary C. Fuller, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
“Bringing Roanoke Home: England’s First Colony and the Media of Early Modern Geography”
Stephanie Leitche, Florida International University
“Flatland: Maps, Marvels & the Edge of the World”
Todd P. Olson, University of California, Berkeley
“Printed Matter: The Graphic Translation of the Codex Mendoza”
Sofia Sanabrais, Los Angeles County Museum of Art
“‘The Spaniards of Asia’: The Encounter between Japan and New Spain and the Impact of Material Culture”
Friday, February, 18, 2011
Visual and Material Culture in Pre- and Post-Conquest Mexico and Peru
Cecilia Klein, University of California, Los Angeles
“Blindfolds and the Eternal Return in Postclassic Mexican Art”
Stella Nair, University of California, Riverside
“Reflections on Architecture, Space, and Colonialism in the Andes”
Friday and Saturday, March 5, 2011
Richard Kagan, Johns Hopkins University
“Policia and the Plaza: Utopia and Dystopia in the Colonial City”
Thursday, March 31, 2011
Jennifer Hughes, University of California, Riverside
“Material Culture and Religion in Latin America: Theoretical and Methodological Approaches”
Friday, April 15, 2011
Dana Leibsohn, Smith College
2003-2004
December 1, 2003
Keven Salatino, Los Angeles County Museum of Art
“Fuseli’s Phallus: Art, Sex, & Imagination”
February 7, 2004
John Ghazvinian, Christ Church College, Oxford
“‘A certain tickling humour’: English Travellers Abroad, 1550-1650”
