Sea Sense: Blue Humanities and the Early Modern Imaginary

Lyle Massey, Associate Professor, Art History, UC Irvine

Lyle Massey is an historian of early modern Italian and French art with research interests that span the historical divide between the Renaissance and Baroque. Much of my work to date has been concerned with the subtle relationship between art and science in the 15th through the 17th centuries: I’ve written on the geometry of linear perspective, on anamorphic perspective and on Renaissance and Baroque anatomical representations, and I have strong interests in the history of collecting and the origins of artistic academies in Italy and France. But I am also concerned with articulating how the body, or even the concept of embodiment more generally, entered into practices of representation ca. 1550-1800. What did it mean for an early modern viewer to see a painting as an extension of his/her own space? How was the body understood, both as a subject of representation and as the point of origin for representation?

Julia Reinhard Lupton, Faculty Director, Illuminations: The Chancellor’s Arts and Culture Initiative, UC Irvine

Julia Reinhard Lupton is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine. In 2013-14, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship for her book project, “Shakespeare Dwelling: Habitation, Hospitality, Design.” In 2007, she was named a Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of California, Irvine, in recognition of her contributions to Shakespeare studies. In 2014, she was elected Trustee of the Shakespeare Association of America.  As co-director of the UCI Shakespeare Center, Julia Lupton organizes seminars and lectures for UC Irvine’s New Swan Shakespeare Festival. She also runs a county-wide series of book clubs and helps create innovative events such as The Hamlet Trial, featuring Dean Erwin Chemerinsky (Berkeley Law) and Dean Song Richardson (UCI Law). The event combines law, society and culture in a public humanities format.

 The Sea: Mobility, Ingenuity, and Ecology in the Early Modern World

Cynthia Fang, Graduate Student, Art History, UCLA

Cynthia Fang is a second year MA-Ph.D. student in the Department of Art History at UCLA. Her research focuses on transcultural connections between early modern Europe and China.

Zachary Korol-Gold, Graduate Student, Visual Studies, UC Irvine

Zachary Korol-Gold is a PhD student in Visual Studies at UC Irvine and a curator living in Los Angeles. His research spans ecological art, alternative agriculture, and the history and visual culture of environmentalism. He directs the contemporary art gallery Garden and is 1/2 of Cultivar, a podcast on art and ecology. Personal website: https://thisismy.website/

Drew Lash, Graduate Student, Art History, UCLA

Drew Erin Becker Lash is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Art History at UCLA. She previously earned masters’ degrees at Columbia University in Art History in 2018, and at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid in Estudios Artísticos, Literarios, y de la Cultura in 2016. She completed her bachelor’s degree at Johns Hopkins in Art History and International Studies in 2014. Her doctoral research will focus on the painting of the wider Hapsburg Empire in the seventeenth century, concentrating primarily on that of Spain and Italy. 

Sara Sisun, Graduate Student, Visual Studies, UC Irvine