Materialized Identities
Objects, Affects and Effects
in Early Modern Culture
1450-1750
People
Susanna Burghartz
is professor of Renaissance and Early Modern History at the University of Basel. She also serves as a member of the National Research Council (SNSF) and has been Beaufort Visiting Fellow at St. John's College, Cambridge. Her current research interests include european-global travel narratives around 1600, the permanent reformation, gender and marriage in early modern Europe, digital editions and a premodern europan history in global perspective. Together with Lucas Burkart and Christine Göttler she is editor of Sites of Mediation. Connected Histories of Places, Processes, and Objects in Europe and Beyond, 1450–1650 (Brill, 2016).
Lucas Burkart
has been Professor of History at the University of Basel since 2012. Previously he was a Swiss National Science Foundation Research Professor at the University of Lucerne where he directed a research project on the cultural history of knowledge in the age of the scientific revolution on Athanasius Kircher. His research interests encompass the cultural history of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, medieval visual culture, the history of material culture in the Italian Renaissance, and the history of historiography. He has been a Research Fellow of the Swiss National Science Foundation several times and was a member of the Istituto Svizzero di Roma from 2001 to 2003. Currently, he is overseeing the completion of the critical edition of the works by Jacob Burckhardt (JBW).
Katherine Bond
is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Department of History, the University of Basel. She previously trained as an art historian at the University of Auckland, before taking up a PhD in Early Modern History at the University of Cambridge. Her dissertation, defended in early 2018, set out to understand the development of costume imagery in Europe during a period of heightened transnational exchange. Entitled ‘Costume Albums in Charles V’s Habsburg Empire, 1528-29’, her doctoral dissertation concentrated on early Renaissance costume albums and ethnographic interests as they developed within courtly imperial networks. Her research interests more broadly centre around the visual culture of the early modern world, with an especial focus on global encounters, exchanges of ethnographic knowledge, and contemporary pictorial methods and practices.
Christine Göttler
is Professor of Art History at the University of Bern. Before joining the University of Bern in 2009, she was Professor of Art History at the University of Washington in Seattle. Her current research interests include concern collecting practices, collection spaces, the interactions between the various arts in the Netherlands and historical aspects of early modern artists’ materials such as wax, copper, papier-mâché, and, most recently, silver and gold. Her professional awards include fellowships from the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (Wassenaar), the International Research Centre for Cultural History (Vienna), the Centre for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (Washington, DC), the J. Paul Getty Research Institute (Los Angeles, CA), and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (Berlin).
Stefan Hanß
is a Research Associate in Early Modern European Object History at the University of Cambridge, Faculty of History, and St John's College. As a member of the Basel-Bern-Cambridge research group on early modern 'materialized identities', he is conducting research on early modern featherwork. He focuses on Reformation Germany with a particular interest in studying the history of the body in relation to material culture. His current research is therefore also devoted to the history of hair in Reformation Germany. He published on self-narratives and concepts of time as well as practices of timing in early modern Germany. His research furthermore centres on Christian-Muslim cultural encounters in the Mediterranean. The PhD thesis examined the sixteenth-century global event-making of the Battle of Lepanto and thereby decentered the history of Lepanto, which is commonly defined as a victory of ‘Christian Europe'. He also published on Veneto-Ottoman diplomacy, Mediterranean slavery and its implications for the historiography of slavery as well as on the emergence of Ottoman language studies in Central Europe around 1600.
Ulinka Rublack
is professor of early modern European history at Cambridge University and a Fellow of St John's College. She is author of a prize-winning study of the role of Renaissance dress to create visual realities and stimulate cultural debate, Dressing Up: Culture Identity in Renaissance Europe, Oxford University Press 2010 and co-editor of the recent full colour edition of the sartorial biography of a sixteenth-century accountant: The First Book of Fashion (Bloomsbury, 2015). She has also published on Reformation Europe, The Crimes of Women in Early Modern Germany and edited the Concise Companion to History . Ulinka's new book The Astronomer & the Witch: Johannes Kepler's Defense of His Mother was published by Oxford University Press in October 2015. She is editor of the forthcoming Oxford History of the Protestant Reformations (2017).
Rachele Scuro
is a post-doctoral Research Associate at the Department of History/University of Basel. She studied at the University Ca’ Foscari of Venice gaining a Laurea cum laude in History. In 2012 she completed her Ph.D. at the University of Siena with a thesis entitled “Bassano: Society and Economy in an autonomous Small City of the Venetian Terraferma during the XVth Century”. She specializes in the economic and social history of Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy, and focuses especially on Venice and the Venetian State. She has also extensively worked on the history of Jews in the Medieval and Renaissance period. In 2015 she graduated in archival, diplomatic and palaeographical studies at the Archivio di Stato di Venezia.
Michèle Seehafer
studied Art History, Business Economics and Curatorial Studies at the University of Bern. In October 2015, she received her Master’s degree with distinction with a thesis entitled “The Winter Room at Rosenborg Castle of Christian IV – Art, Science, and Self-Representation”. From March 2012 to February 2016 she was a project assistant in the SNF Sinergia-project “The Interior: Art, Space, and Performance (Early Modern to Postmodern)”, conducted in collaboration with the Institute of Art History, University of Bern and the Institute of Media Culture and Theatre, University of Cologne. From 2015 to 2016 she was a research assistant in Early Modern Art at the Institute of Art History, University of Bern. Since June 2016, she is a doctoral candidate within the subproject “Mutable Matter: Netherlandish Painters on Values, Uses and Effects of Gold” directed by Professor Dr. Christine Göttler.