Notes on Contributors
Tamar Cholcman
is chair of the department of Art History at Tel Aviv University and co-editor- in-chief of the journal Emblematica: Essays in Word and Image. Her research focuses on the ephemeral art of festivals during the 16th and 17th centuries, in general, and on festival emblems, in particular. Her current project concerns the use of emblematics by artists in Northern Renaissance and Baroque Art in order to explore and distinguish their role and place within the Republic of Letters. She is the author of Art on Paper: The Triumphal Entry of the Archdukes Albert and Isabella into Antwerp, 1599 (Brepols: 2014) and of Festival Emblems: A Paradox along the Triumphal Route, forthcoming in the Imago Figurata Studies series (Brepols). Her articles have appeared in the following venues, among others, Word and Image, Viator—Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Source: Notes in the History of Arts, Emblematica: Essays in Word and Image, and Explorations in Renaissance Culture. She is recipient of research grants from, among others, the Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel (2016) and the Israeli Science Foundation for research in the Humanities (2015–2019; 2021–2024). She serves as a member of the Advisory Board of the Society for Emblem Studies; the Discipline Representative (emblem studies) at the Renaissance Society of America (2020–2022); and book review editor of Emblematica: Essays in Word and Image (2018–2022).
Timothy W. Cole
is Elaine and Allen Avner Professor Emeritus, University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign. As a member of the University Library faculty for 31 years and affiliate faculty in the School of Information Science (iSchool) for 20 of those 31 years, Professor Cole has published, taught, and presented widely on digital library system interoperability, the use of Linked Open Data in library applications, metadata applications, web-based annotation service architectures, and document mark-up languages. In his tenure at Illinois he has held appointments as Assistant Engineering Librarian for Information Services, Systems Librarian for Digital Projects, Mathematics Librarian, Interim Head of Library Digital Services and Development, and Coordinator for Library Applications in the iSchool’s Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship. He has co-authored three textbooks: Using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited, 2007); XML for Catalogers and Metadata Librarians (Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited, 2013), Coding with XML for Efficiencies in Cataloging and Metadata: Practical Applications of XSD, XSLT, and XQuery (Chicago, IL: ALA Editions: 2018). He has served as principal investigator (PI) or co-PI for grants funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, and the US Army. In 2017 he received the Frederick G. Kilgour Award for Research in Library and Information Technology, awarded annually by the Online Computer Library Center, Inc., and the Library and Information Technology Association, a division of the American Library Association.
Christopher D. Fletcher
is the Assistant Director of the Center for Renaissance Studies at the Newberry Library in Chicago, IL. He earned his Ph.D. in Medieval History from the University of Chicago in 2015. His research and teaching focus primarily on religion and public engagement before 1800. He has written articles and book chapters and co-edited volumes on various forms of public outreach in medieval and early modern Europe and the digital humanities. He often shares the Newberry’s pre-1800 collections (including emblems!) with the public through in-person collection presentations, exhibitions, social media, and digital resources.
Silvia Glaser
is the head of the industrial arts and design collections (Leiterin der Sammlung Gewerbemuseum und Design) at the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nürnberg. She earned her Ph.D. in Art History from the Friedrich-Alexander- Universität in Erlangen with a work on the early years of porcelain production in Ansbach. She began her current position in 1990, after a two-year curatorial fellowship at the Germanisches Nationalmuseum. Between 1990 and 2003, she taught courses in art history at the Universität Erlangen, the Akademie der Bildenen Künste in Nürnberg, and at the Universität Bern (Switzerland) on the subject of “Art and Vocation.” Since 1987, she has authored numerous publications on the applied arts (goldsmithing, tin-glazed earthenware, porcelain, glass) in the early modern period, with a particular emphasis on ceramics. She has also curated four major exhibitions on the applied and industrial arts at the Germanisches Nationalmuseum: Finnisches Glas der Gegenwart (1992), Die italienischen Fayencen im Germanischen Nationalmuseum (2000), Nürnberger Fayencen im Germanischen Nationalmuseum (2017), and 150 Jahre Bayerisches Gewerbemuseum Nürnberg (2019). Since 1998, she has also been a jury member for the annual competition “Design im Handwerk,” held by the Handwerkskammer Mittelfranken.
Victoria Gutsche
is a research fellow at Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nürnberg. Her research centers on early modern literature, editorial studies, literature of the 19th and 20th century, German-Jewish literature, and diversity in literature. In addition to book chapters and articles she has published Zwischen Abgrenzung und Annäherung. Konstruktionen des Jüdischen in der Literatur des 17. Jahrhunderts (2014) and Die Romantrilogie. Zur Geschichte einer großen Form von ihren Anfängen bis zur Mitte des 10. Jahrhunderts (2023); her edition of Julius Wilhelm Zincgref’s Deutsche Kleinschriften (with Werner Wilhelm Schnabel and Dirk Niefanger) is forthcoming.
Stephanie Leitch
Associate professor of Art History at Florida State University, Stephanie Leitch specializes in the history of early modern printmaking. Her book Mapping Ethnography in Early Modern Germany (2010) won the Roland Bainton Book Prize in Art History. Her forthcoming book, The Art of Observation in Early Modern Print Media: Training the Literate Eye (Cambridge University Press, 2024), explores how illustrations in the now little-known genres of cosmographies and physiognomies coached early modern readers to make visual decisions. This investigation into the image program of these published books is poised at the confluence of art history, book history, and investigations into knowledge-making genres active in the history of science. Her project about the role of copied images in early modern travel narratives is sponsored by a collaborative research fellowship from the ACLS.
Thomas Schauerte
Born in Aachen, Germany. 1987–1996 M.A. studies in History, English, Latin, Philosophy, Christian Archaeology and Art History (major), at universities in Bayreuth and Berlin, M.A.-diploma at Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nürnberg on „Überlegungen zum druckgraphischen Werk Albrecht Altdorfers.” From 1997 freelance at the Gräflich Pappenheim’sche Verwaltung, Pappenheim: historical studies of local and art history. 1997 Postgraduate student at Vienna university. December 1999 Dr. phil. at the Freie Universität Berlin: „Die Ehrenpforte für Kaiser Maximilian I.” From 2000 freelance at the Germanisches Nationalmuseum Nürnberg for the catalogue of Dürer’s graphic oeuvre. Since 2001 teaching commissions at the universities of Berlin, Heidelberg, Trier, Erlangen, and Regensburg. 2001 research grant at the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel. 2001/03 exhibition curator „Albrecht Dürer: Das große Glück. Kunst im Zeichen des geistigen Aufbruchs,” at the Kulturgeschichtliches Museum Osnabrück. 2005/06 exhibition curator „Der Kardinal. Albrecht von Brandenburg, Renaissancefürst und Mäzen“, at the Museum Moritzburg, Halle/S. March/April 2007 Guest Curator at the Academy of Arts, Honolulu, Hawai’i. From 2009–2019 director of the Albrecht-Dürer-House, Stadtmuseum Fembo-Haus and curator of the art collections of the City of Nürnberg. Since 2019 director of the municipal museums of Aschaffenburg. 2023 habilitation on “Das totale Kunstwerk. Haus und Kirche des Egid Quirin Asam in München.”
W.W. Schnabel
After completing his military service, Werner Wilhelm Schnabel studied history, German studies, sociology, and political science at the universities of Erlangen-Nürnberg, Zürich, and Vienna. He completed his studies by passing the state examination for teaching in higher education and received his Ph.D. in 1990 in the subject of Bavarian and Franconian history with a dissertation on “Österreichische Exulanten in oberdeutschen Reichsstädten” [Austrian Religious Refugees in Southern German Imperial Cities]. He spent years as a researcher on the editing project “Wissenschaftliche Erstausgabe der Schriften Julius Wilhelm Zincgrefs” [Scholarly First Editions of the Writings of Julius Wilhelm Zincgref], a third-party funded independent research project to catalog early modern manuscripts, and in 2000 he earned his postdoctoral qualification (Habilitation) with his research on the early history of friendship books (Stammbücher or alba amicorum). He completed another third-party funded independent project concerning literature of the nonacademic milieu in the seventeenth century. Since 2007 he has been a professor of modern German literature and a researcher at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg. Schnabel is the editor of the online database “Repertorium Alborum Amicorum,” started in 1998, and researches the overlapping areas of literature and the history of art, culture, and society. He is particularly interested in Franconia and the contextualization of personal histories.
Andrew Schwenk
is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of Germanic Languages & Literatures at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Studying under Professor Mara Wade, he is specializing in early modern German literature with a graduate concentration in Medieval Studies. He has additional expertise in digital humanities. His dissertation research focuses on imaginative travel and its relationship to contemporary social change in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century German literature. He was a member of the research team transcribing the Rötenbeck volume and has presented this research at the Newberry Library, Chicago; he has also presented his research at the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference and the Renaissance Society of America. He previously worked as a freelance translator, providing English subtitles for episodes of shows such as Tatort and Wilsberg.
Jeffrey Chipps Smith
Professor Emeritus and Kay Fortson Chair in European Art at the University of Texas, Austin, specializes in Northern European art 1400–1700, especially that of Germany and the Netherlands. Smith’s publications focus on Nuremberg and its culture, Albrecht Dürer, German sculpture, goldsmith work, Jesuits, Northern Renaissance art, patronage, and issues of historiography and reception, among other topics. His latest books are Albrecht Dürer and the Embodiment of Genius: Decorating Museums in the Nineteenth Century (Penn State Press, 2020), Kunstkammer: Early Modern Art and Curiosity Cabinets in the Holy Roman Empire (London: Reaktion Books, 2022), and Albrecht Dürer’s Afterlife (London: Lund Humphries, May 2024). He was articles editor of Renaissance Quarterly and inaugural co-editor of the Journal of the Historians of Netherlandish Art. Smith served on the board of directors of the College Art Association, Renaissance Society of America, Frühe Neuzeit Interdisziplinär, Historians of Netherlandish Art, and Sixteenth Century Society and Conference. In 2018, he was feted with a Festschrift entitled Imagery and Ingenuity in Early Modern Europe: Essays in Honor of Jeffrey Chipps Smith (Brepols).
Mara R. Wade
is Professor Emerita of Germanic Languages & Literatures at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is the immediate past president of the Renaissance Society of America.
Her research focuses on emblems, court studies of Germany and Scandinavia, gender studies, and German literature and the arts in the early modern period. She is an associate editor of Emblematica: Essays in Word and Image and the PI for Emblematica Online. She has held fellowships as a Getty Scholar 2018–2019; Newberry Library long-term fellow 2016–2017; as a fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, Uppsala, Sweden 2023; and she holds a senior research prize from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, a lifetime achievement award in recognition of her work in fostering German-American research networks. She was also awarded the prize for excellence in undergraduate teaching from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, University of Illinois.
An edited volume, Collections and Books, Images and Texts: Early Modern German Cultures of the Book was published as volume 49 of Chloe 2023.
Jessica R. Wells
received her Ph.D. in Classical Philology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2019. She completed her dissertation on the epigrammatic corpus of the Roman poet Martial, focusing on the text as a body and the body as a text. She has also written on the daring of Icarus and Daedalus flying away from Crete as a representation of the artist, proxemics in Herodotus, myth and spectacle in modern film, and zombie movies as katabatic journeys. She teaches ancient Greek, Latin, and humanities at Tempe Preparatory Academy in Tempe, AZ.