Sabina Zonno

Dr. Sabina Zonno is a Postdoctoral Scholar affiliated with the USC Center for the Premodern World and the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute. She is also the Curatorial Research Associate of European Art at The Huntington Art Museum. At USC, she is currently co-directing with Prof. Lynn Dodd the twice NEH-funded Global Virtual Access Library (GVAL) project, meant to create a new, open access research and teaching tool that offers virtual engagement with ancient manuscripts in their original contexts.  

Dr. Zonno is an art historian specializing in Medieval and Renaissance illustrated books from Europe with experience in digital humanities. Her research explores medieval visual and material culture with a focus on women’s agency, identity, literacy, and spirituality expressed through images and texts. 

Zonno has been working on a series of projects resulting in publishing, exhibiting, and cataloguing manuscript collections in Italy and in the United States of America. She first came to USC as a USC-Huntington EMSI postdoctoral scholar in Art History in 2017-2019 to study the Medieval and Renaissance illustrated manuscripts held by USC Libraries’ Special Collections. 

She has published articles in top Italian peer reviewed journals on illuminated manuscript studies and as invited contributions for international volumes. A monographic issue of Art de l’enluminure (2013) was devoted to her research. She also co-edited the first volume of a new series titled Medieval Veneto Medieval Europe. Identity and Alterity (Padua University Press, 2013).

Her first monograph book entitled A Women’s Book: The Story of the Psalter in the Episcopal Seminary Library in Padua (MS 353) is under contract with Brepols Publishers.

Her work has been supported by publication and research grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, and the International Center of Medieval Art.

• Ph.D. Art History, Padua University, Italy, 11/2011