Professor Diana Bullen Presciutti

Biography

My primary research addresses the visual culture of social problems, popular piety, and institutional charity in late medieval and early modern Italy (1350-1650), focusing on devotional practices, urban and extra-urban ritual, civic ideology, and intersections of class, gender, and cultural production. More broadly, my research interests include: visual constructions of individual and institutional identity; the interrelated operations of visual, oral, and textual rhetorics; the transmission, evolution, and re-deployment of representational conventions across time and space; and relationships between institutional ideologies, built and natural environments, ritual practices, and popular culture. At the heart of all these concerns is an understanding of images as active agents and a commitment to analyzing the processes through which visual culture shapes perceptions. Much of my research to date has been concerned with the relationship between visual culture and social problems, a variation on the ‘social history of art’ that combines sociological methods with very close attention to the distinctive operations of the visual. My earlier work centered on charitable institutions—hospitals, confraternities—whereas more recently I have shifted focus to consider intersections between gender, sexuality, and class in the context of popular piety. I have authored two monographs—Visual Cultures of Foundling Care in Renaissance Italy (Ashgate, 2015) and Saints, Miracles, and Social Problems in Italian Renaissance Art (Cambridge University Press, 2023)—and edited an interdisciplinary anthology—Space, Place, and Motion: Locating Confraternities in the Late Medieval and Early Modern City (Brill, 2017). Saints, Miracles, and Social Problems won the 2023 American Association of Italian Studies Book Prize in the Visual Studies, Film and Media category. I have also published research articles in key journals including Art History, the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, and Renaissance Quarterly, along with a number of chapters in edited collections. My research has been supported by fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Villa I Tatti: The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, among others. I am currently at work on several research projects. I retain a focus on the visual culture of miracles in Printing the Miraculous: Gender, Popular Religion, and Everyday Life in Renaissance Italy (short book, under contract with Cambridge University Press). Through a series of comparative case studies of miracle stories that focus on gender, sexuality, and domestic life, Printing the Miraculous elucidates how the woodcuts that accompanied these widely diffused tales shaped popular conceptions of the ways in which divine and demonic forces influenced human relations in late fifteenth-century Italy. My next major project centers on the interplay between everyday devotional practices, roadside chapels, and the diverse topography of the Italian peninsula. This book, tentatively titled Roadside Religion: Visual Culture, Ecology, and Everyday Devotion in Renaissance Italy, uncovers how wayside niches, tabernacles, and shrines worked in productive dialogue with their surrounding environs to structure both quotidian and extraordinary patterns of prayer, invocation, and thanksgiving.

Qualifications

• PhD, History of Art, University of Michigan, 2008

• MA, Italian Renaissance Art History, Syracuse University in Florence, 2003

• BA, Art History, Dartmouth College, 1998

Appointments

University of Essex

• Professor of Art History, University of Essex (1/10/2021 - present)

• Senior Lecturer of Art History, University of Essex (1/10/2017 - 30/9/2021)

• Lecturer of Art History, University of Essex (9/2015 - 9/2017)

Other academic

• Assistant Professor of Art History, College of Wooster (2011 - 2015)

• Visiting Assistant Professor of Art History, Berea College (2010 - 2011)

• Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Humanities Research Center, Rice University (2008 - 2010)