Marisa Bass (Yale)

Marisa Anne Bass is Associate Professor of Northern European Art (1400–1700) in the History of Art Department at Yale University, and an Affiliate of Yale’s Program in the History of Science and Medicine. Her scholarship focuses on intersections between visual and intellectual culture in the early modern period, addressing topics that range from natural history to political iconoclasm. Her monographs include Jan Gossart and the Invention of Netherlandish Antiquity (Princeton University Press, 2016) and Insect Artifice: Nature and Art in the Dutch Revolt (Princeton University Press, 2019), which won the 2020 Bainton Prize in art and music history from the Sixteenth Century Society. Her work has been supported by membership at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study. Her latest book, The Monument’s End: Public Art and the Modern Republic, is expected to appear in 2023.

Alex Borucki (UCI)

Alex Borucki is Associate Professor of History at UC Irvine. His book, From Shipmates to Soldiers: Emerging Black Identities in the Río de la Plata focuses on the impact of mutual experiences and social networks on identity formation among Africans and their descendants. This work casts new light on the thousands of Africans who arrived in Montevideo and Buenos Aires at the peak of the slave trade. In addition, it gives center stage to a single black writer who left a comprehensive record of this time: Jacinto Ventura de Molina (1766-1841). He argues that black identities emerged from shared slave routes, the reshaping of ethnic boundaries, and participation in organizations ranging from Catholic brotherhoods to colonial militias. He explore experiences that bonded free blacks and slaves to each other and to the larger societies in which they found themselves. The slave trade, Catholic black lay brotherhoods, African-based associations, and black military service were crucial and overlapping fields of experience. While previous historiography has focused on one or another of these fields at a time, he shows how individuals operated across these interconnected organizations.

Jeffrey Cohen (Arizona State University)

Jeffrey Cohen is the dean of humanities in The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Arizona State University. Professor Cohen comes to ASU from George Washington University in Washington, D.C., where he served as a professor and chair of the department of English. During his 23-year tenure there, he founded the Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute, which brought together 22 faculty members across nine departments, as well as allied faculty from area institutions. He currently serves, with Stacy Alaimo, as co-president of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE), the largest professional organization in the environmental humanities. His research examines strange and beautiful things that challenge the imagination, phenomena that seem alien and intimate at once. He is especially interested in what monsters, foreigners, misfits, inhuman forces, objects and matter that won’t stay put reveal about the cultures that dream, fear and desire them. He is widely published in the fields of medieval studies, monster theory, posthumanism and ecocriticism. His book, Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman, received the 2017 Rene Wellek Prize for best book in comparative literature from the American Comparative Literature Association. In collaboration with ASU Professor Lindy Elkins-Tanton, he recently co-wrote the book Earth, a re-examination of Earth from the perspectives of a planetary scientist and a literary humanist.

Kevin Dawson (UC Merced)

Kevin Dawson is an Associate historian of the African diaspora and Atlantic history at UC, Merced.  My scholarship considers how enslaved Africans recreated and reimagined African aquatic traditions, including swimming, underwater diving, canoe-making, canoeing, and surfing.  He has published numerous scholarly articles, as well as popular articles in SURFER Magazine and SWIMMER Magazine, and AfroSurf-The Book.  His article “Enslaved Swimmers and Divers in the Atlantic World” published in the Journal of American History was awarded the 2004 Louis Pelzer Memorial Award by the Organization of American Historians.  Dr. Dawson was a 2004-2005 Ford Dissertation Fellow.  His book, Under Currents of Power: Aquatic Culture in the African Diaspora was awarded the 2019 Harriet Tubman Prize by The Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery at the Schomburg Center.

Anne Goldgar (USC)

Anne Goldgar is the inaugural Garrett and Anne Van Hunnick Professor of European History at the University of Southern California. From 1993 until June 2020 she taught at King’s College London, where she was Professor of Early Modern History. She has published widely on topics to do with early modern cultural history, from intellectual culture and institutions, the history of collecting, and the relationships between art, commerce, science, and history in the early modern period. She is the author of, among others, Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters 1680-1750 and Tulipmania: Money, Honor, and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age, which won the American Historical Associations Leo Gershoy Award for the best book in 17th- and 18th-century European history. Most recently she has co-edited with Inger Leemans Early Modern Knowledge Societies as Affective Economies and a special issue of The Journal of the History of Collecting on Early Modern Collections in Use, which will appear in hard copy this summer. She is currently working on the cultural and political resonances and afterlives of the Nova Zembla expeditions of 1596-7 in Dutch culture from 1598 to the present.

Hanneke Grootenboer (Radboud University)

Hanneke Grootenboer is Professor of History of Art and Chair at Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands.  She is the author of The Rhetoric of Perspective: Realism and Illusionism in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Still Life (Chicago UP, 2005), Treasuring the Gaze: Intimate Vision in Late Eighteenth-Century Eye Miniatures (Chicago UP, 2014), winner of the 2014 Kenshur Prize for eighteenth century studies and The Pensive Image: Art as a Form of Thinking (Chicago UP, 2021).  Her research on early modern visual and material culture in a transhistorical perspective has been published in The Art Bulletin and Art History, among other venues.  She is the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships, including from the Andrew Mellon Foundation, the Clark Art Institute, the Leverhulme Trust and the Netherlandish Institute for Advanced Study, and a member of the Editorial Board of the Oxford Art Journal.  She will be the Erasmus Lecturer at Harvard University in the Fall of 2021. 

David Igler (UCI)

David Igler is Professor of History at UC Irvine, where he has taught since 2003.  His research fields include Pacific history, environmental history, and the American West.  He is the author of The Great Ocean: Pacific Worlds from Captain Cook to the Gold Rush (Oxford, 2013) and Industrial Cowboys: Miller & Lux and the Transformation of the Far West, 1850-1920 (UC, 2001), among other works.  He previously taught at the University of Utah (1999-2003) and is Past President of the PCB-AHA. 

Andrew Lipman (Barnard College)

Andrew Lipman is Associate Professor of History at Barnard College, Columbia University. He’s the author of The Saltwater Frontier: Indians and the Contest for the American Coast (Yale, 2015).

Julia Reinhard Lupton (UCI)

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.

Lyle Massey (UCI)

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?

Steven Mentz (St. John’s University)

Steve Mentz is Professor of English at St. John’s University in New York City. His most recent book, Ocean, appeared in March 2020 in Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series. He is the author of four other books, Break Up the Anthropocene (2019), Shipwreck Modernity: Ecologies of Globalization, 1550-1719 (2015), At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean (2009) and Romance for Sale in Early Modern England (2006). He is also editor or co-editor of six collections: The Cultural History of the Sea in the Early Modern Age (2021), The Routledge Companion to Marine and Maritime Worlds, 1400-1800 (2020), The Sea in Nineteenth-Century Anglophone Literary Culture (2017), Oceanic New York (2015), The Age of Thomas Nashe (2013), and Rogues and Early Modern English Culture (2004). He has written numerous articles and chapters on ecocriticism, Shakespeare, early modern literature, and the blue humanities. He curated an exhibition at the Folger Shakespeare Library, “Lost at Sea: The Ocean in the English Imagination, 1550 – 1750” (2010). He blogs at The Bookfish, www.stevementz.com and tweets @stevermentz.  

Jessica Millward (UCI)

Jessica Millward is an Associate Professor in the Department of History and Core Faculty member of African American Studies at UC Irvine.  An expert on issues related to race, gender and social justice, Dr. Millward’s first book, Finding Charity’s Folk: Enslaved and Free Black women in Maryland was published as part of the Race in the Atlantic World series, Athens: University of Georgia Press (2015).   An award winning scholar, she has published in the Journal of African American History, the Journal of Women’s History, Frontiers, Souls and the Women’s History Review as well as Op-eds in Chronicle of Higher Education, The Feministwire.com and The Conversation.com.  Millward is currently working on a book length project that discusses African American women’s experiences with sexual assault and intimate partner violence in the late19th century. 

A media savvy historian, Millward specializes in bringing a historical perspective to modern times.  Along with  Kacey Calahane and Max Speare, Millward  is a co-host of the podcast, “Historians on Housewives.”  This podcast  with some 20,000 + subscribers examines the long running Bravo franchise through the lens of historical scholarship.  With Tiffany Willoughby-Herard and Johnanna Ferdnandez, Millward curates, “Activist Studio West: A Digital Repository for Movement Material.”

Jane Newman (UCI)

Jane Newman is Professor of Comparative Literature at UC Irvine. Newman is the author of Pastoral Conventions (1990), The Intervention of Philology (2000), and Benjamin’s Library: Modernity, Nation, and the Baroque (2011). She is the English-language translator of a selection of Erich Auerbach’s essays (2014; ppb. 2016). She is currently working on two books, one on the legacy of Auerbach, and the other provisionally entitled After Westphalia: Early Modern Lessons for the Post-Modern Age. She was a Guggenheim Fellow, 1998-99, a Humboldt Fellow, 1991-92, 2004, and 2012, and a Senior Fulbright Scholar at the Free University in Berlin, 2010-11. During 2015-16, she held the M.H. Abrams Fellowship at the National Humanities Center, Research Triangle, North Carolina. In Spring, 2017, she held a Berlin Prize as the John P. Birkelund Fellow in the Humanities at the American Academy in Berlin (Germany).

Claudia Swan (Washington University)

Claudia Swan is the Mark S. Weil Professor of Art History and Archaeology at Washington University in St. Louis, and a scholar of early modern northern European visual culture with a concentration in the Dutch world. She has published numerous articles and book chapters on early modern art, science, and collecting and on Dutch visual culture. Recent publications include a special issue of NUNCIUS on early modern geometries; a study of Dutch liefhebberij as a market sensibility, and her monograph Rarities of these Lands: Art, Trade, and Diplomacy in the Dutch Republic (Princeton University Press). With Marisa Bass, Anne Goldgar, and Hanneke Grootenboer, she is a co-author of Conchophilia. Shells, Art, and Curiosity in Early Modern Europe, forthcoming from Princeton University Press.

Bronwen Wilson (UCLA)

Bronwen Wilson teaches Art History at UCLA where she is also Director of the Center for 17^th– and 18^th-Century Studies and William Andrews Memorial Clark Library. Her research and teaching explore the artistic and urban culture of early modern Italy and Europe, with a focus on space, print, and transcultural and material interactions. Some recent publications are “The Itinerant Artist and the Islamic Urban Prospect” in Artibus et Historiae (2017); Making Worlds: Art, Materiality, and Early Modern Globalization, a special issue of Journal of Early Modern History (2019), co-edited with Angela Vanhaelen; “Art History, Boundary Crossing, Making Worlds,” in I Tatti Studies (2019); and an Afterword, “Ornament and the Fabrication of Early Modern Worlds,” for Bodies and Maps (2021). Her essay, “Lithic Images, Jacopo Ligozzi, and the Descrizione del Sacro Monte della Vernia (1612),” is forthcoming in the volume Conversion Machines in Early Modern Europe: Apparatus, Artifice, Body she is co-editing with Paul Yachnin (EUP). That research connects to her new book project,  Otherworldly Natures: the subterranean imminence of stone, probes artistic and ecological engagement with quarries, riverbeds, and lithic formations from the middle of the fifteenth century to the beginning of the seventeenth.

Julian Yates (University of Delaware)

Julian Yates is the H. Fletcher Brown Professor of English and Material Culture Studies at University of Delaware. He writes about Medieval and Renaissance literature and culture, questions of ecology, the posthuman, and literary theory; and is the author or editor of four books: Error, Misuse, Failure: Object Lessons from the English Renaissance (Minnesota, 2003), which was a finalist for the Modern Language Association’s Best First Book Prize in 2003; What’s the Worst Thing You Can Do To Shakespeare? (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013),co-authored with Richard Burt; Object-Oriented Environs in Early Modern England (Punctum Books, 2016), co-edited with Jeffrey Jerome Cohen; and Of Sheep, Oranges, and Yeast: A Multispecies Impression, (Minnesota, 2017). His research has been supported by grants from the Andrew Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Huntington Library, and the American Philosophical Society.

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

Abigail Berry (UCLA)

Abigail Berry is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Art History at UCLA specializing in medieval architecture. She previously earned a master’s degree at Queen’s University in Canada where she wrote on the intersections of engineering, art history, and art conservation.

Nicolyna Enriquez (UCLA)

Kathie Foley-Meyer (UCI)

Kathie Foley-Meyer is a media artist and Doctoral Student in Visual Studies at UC Irvine. Her research interests dovetail with the subject matter of her artwork, which is frequently inspired by the history of African American life, and explores themes of interconnectedness, memory, visibility and transparency. Two of her recent mixed-media artworks, Twelve Voyages (2017) and In The Wake: With the Bones of Our Ancestors (2018) address the loss of generations of human life associated with the transatlantic slave trade and the African diaspora. She’s also an arts nonprofit consultant who recently served as Chair of the board of LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions), and is currently on the advisory committee for Fulcrum Arts.

Margaret Oakley (UCI)

Margaret Oakley is a second year graduate student in the UC Irvine Art MFA Program. Working across a variety of mediums including sculpture, sound, and text, her art practice is rooted in a non-hierarchical vision of totality, drawing from feminist histories, folk knowledge, and expanded notions of ecology.

Gregory Sattler (UCLA)

Gregory Sattler is a first-year PhD student in the History Department at UCLA. His research explores the relationships between sea merchants and government officials in premodern East Asia, with a particular focus on regional networks. His recent article in this year’s issue of the Journal of Asian Humanities at Kyushu University, titled “The Ideological Underpinnings of Private Trade in East Asia” provides a reassessment of Confucian ideology and commercial exchange in East Asia through the scope of intellectual, social, and trade history.”