My Experience
I have 4 years of experience teaching History of Art to undergraduates. This was at the University of Reading and the focus of the course was on the Italian artist, architect and writer Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574). In this class we focused on the text and publication history of Vasari's famous compendium of biographies, The Lives of the Most Excellent Paints, Sculptors and Architect's (first published in 1550; republished, enlarged and revised in 1568), which is generally considered the first printed work of art history and alongside Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier (1528) and Machiavelli's The Prince (1532) it is one of the books most emblematic of the Italian Renaissance - indeed, it is believed to be the first publication in which the word 'renaissance' (rinascimento) appears in print. My students acquired visual fluency in Italian art of the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and a critical understanding of the technical and stylistic progression of art throughout this period, each seminar focusing on one or two of its key figures: Cimabue, Giotto, Masaccio, Bellini, Mantegna, Donatello, Botticelli, Leonardo, Raphael, Titian and Michelangelo. By the end of the term they had a grasp of the main aesthetic and ideological concerns and motivations in Vasari's text and how they linked up to the broader context of Italian Renaissance intellectual history and historiography. We addressed complex questions such as the status of the artist, the culture of disegno, patronage and power - taking into consideration the book's conception and voyage to press and how it has shaped our own understanding of the Italian Renaissance. The class also involved a trip to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford where we studied some of the finer examples of the museum's magnificent collection of drawings by Michelangelo and Raphael.
My Qualifications
University of Reading, Reading, United Kingdom
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph. D.), Italian Studies, 2017
Full doctoral award (Ā£40,906), Arts and Humanities Research Council
Dissertation title: āCaravaggio in Naplesā
UniversitĆ degli studi di Napoli Federico II, Naples, Italy
Visiting doctoral student, May-September, 2013
ERASMUS travel grant (Ā£800)
University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom
Master of Philosophy (M. Phil.), Early Modern History, 2011
Distinction
University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Master of Arts (M. A.), History of Art, 2010
