Notes on Contributors
Marta Ajmar
is Head of Postgraduate Programmes at the V&A. She is a historian of early modern material culture and design, interested in histories and practices of making and in experiential pedagogies for higher education. Her new book Hands- on learning and making: Interdisciplinary perspectives on embodied engagement (co-edited with Catherine Speight) is forthcoming from UCL Press in 2022 (with support from the V&A Research Institute and the A. W. Mellon Foundation). She is currently completing a monograph (supported by a Leverhulme Research Fellowship) exploring material mimesis in Italian Renaissance artefacts by examining practices of material imitation and reinvention and the role of artisans as material knowers from a cross-cultural perspective. Her publications include Approaching the Italian Renaissance interior: Sources, methodologies, debates (Oxford 2007) (co-edited with Flora Dennis and Ann Matchette); At home in Renaissance Italy (London 2006) (co-edited with Flora Dennis), which accompanied the major V&A exhibition; and Approaches to Renaissance consumption (Oxford 2002).
Leah Anderson
is a Swiss/American artist living in the small alpine village of Venthône, where she also maintains her studio. Many of her works in her artistic practice are informed and shown in urban spaces or through modes of virtual circulation. In her artistic research, Leah Anderson questions the status of the unique, the multiple and the copy in a work of art and other forms of cultural mimesis. She produces independent publications, serial drawings, performative readings, sculptural installations, and sometimes works that call for her “first love:” the medium of ceramics.
Samir Boumediene
is a researcher at the Institut d’histoire des représentations et des idées dans les modernités (Lyon). Trained in history and epistemology, he published his PhD on the history of New World medicinal plants in 2016 under the title La colonisation du savoir. He has published several articles on the history of drugs, medicine and plants. His current research deals with the notion of discovery in early modern times and with the history of questionnaires.
Pietro Conte
teaches Aesthetics at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and is a team member of the ERC Advanced Grant project “An-Iconology: History, Theory, and Practices of Environmental Images.” His research revolves around the notions of illusion and hyperrealism in the contemporary arts and media landscape, with a specific focus on immersive virtual environments and on the multifarious practices of un-framing, a thematic cluster that he has addressed in the monographs Unframing aesthetics (Milan 2020) and In carne e cera. Estetica e fenomenologia dell’iperrealismo (Flesh and wax: Aesthetics and phenomenology of hyperrealism, Macerata 2014). He is the editor of the Italian translation of Erwin Panofsky’s Tomb sculpture, Julius von Schlosser’s Geschichte der Porträtbildnerei in Wachs and Adolf Portmann’s Die Tiergestalt.
Britta Dümpelmann
wrote her doctoral thesis on the Cracow Altar of Veit Stoss, as a Ph. D student at the University of Zurich (National Competence Centre of Research Mediality). The thesis was accomplished in 2011, the book was published in 2012, and awarded the Immanuel-Kant-Forschungspreis des Beauftragten der Bundesregierung Deutschland für Kultur und Medien. Britta Dümpelmann has been employed as scientific assistant at Kunstmuseum Basel, Department of Prints and Drawings (2011–2014). She currently holds a position as research assistant at Freie Universität Berlin (chair of Klaus Krüger), and is working on her second book, on colour reduction, fictitiousness, and the relationship between idea and execution in the Visual Arts of the Early Modern Period (Farbreduktion, Fiktionalität und das Verhältnis von Idee und Ausführung in den Bildkünsten der Frühen Neuzeit). Britta Dümpelmann is also guiding a DFG-network on fictitious materials and techniques in the Early and High Middle Ages (Zwischen Präsenz und Evokation. Fingierte Materialien und Techniken im frühen und hohen Mittelalter).
Michelle Henning
is Chair in Photography and Media in the School of the Arts at the University of Liverpool. She writes on photography, new media, museums and exhibitions and cultural history. Her book Photography: The unfettered image was published in 2018. She is also the editor of Museum media (Oxford 2015) and author of Museums, media and cultural theory (Maidenhead 2006). She also works as an artist, designing record covers and art directing for PJ Harvey among others. Her recent essays and articles have addressed contemporary social media photography, and she is conducting ongoing research on the photographic materials industry in 1920s–30s Britain.
Helen Hills
is Professor of Art History at the University of York (the first woman professor of History of Art there). She is author of many articles and of three scholarly monographs: The matter of miracles: Neapolitan baroque architecture and sanctity (Manchester 2016), Invisible city: The architecture of devotion in Neapolitan aristocratic Baroque convents (New York and Oxford 2004), and Marmi mischi siciliani (Messina 1992); editor of 5 books, including Rethinking the Baroque (Farnham 2011; 2015); and editor of special issue Baroque Naples: Place & displacement, OpenArts journal, No. 6 (winter 2017–2018), online: https://openartsjournal.org/issue-6/. She was awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship for her research project on silver, Oct. 2018–Sep. 2019, and is the organiser of an interdisciplinary conference on silver sponsored by the British Academy (2021).
Samuel Iliffe
is a design engineer working in new product development at Petit Pli, the creator of ‘Clothes That Grow’, and before this the first Designer in Residence at the Royal Academy of Art. At the RA he explored the removal of eutrophication nutrients from household waste using Algae bioreactors. His work has revolved around the use of innovative materials to address everyday problems. He studied for an MA/MSc in Innovation Design Engineering from Imperial College London and the Royal College of Art, and a BEng in Mechanical Engineering from Queen Mary (University of London).
Jody Joy
is a Senior Curator of Archaeology at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge, UK, and was formerly Curator of European Iron Age Collections at the British Museum. He has authored or co-authored four books, including A Celtic feast: The Iron Age cauldrons from Chiseldon, Wiltshire (co-authored with A. Baldwin) (London 2017), and has published widely on prehistoric and museum archaeology. In 2019, he was awarded a Headley Fellowship by the Art Fund to investigate Cambridgeshire archaeology.
Hannah Wirta Kinney
is Assistant Curator of Academic Programs at the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College, USA. She completed her DPhil in History of Art at the University of Oxford in 2018 with a dissertation on material innovation and replication in the Grand Ducal Medici’s sculpture workshop. Her research focuses on artistic and technical agency within sculptural workshops, with a particular interest in casting technologies. Her publications have investigated the reproduction of ancient sculpture in porcelain, bronze, and plaster, as well as questions of ownership within Giambologna’s workshop. Hannah’s most recent research project explores the material histories of plaster, casts and their makers in the nineteenth century.
Pauline Krijgsheld
is Assistant Professor and Lecturer at the Graduate School of Life Sciences at both Utrecht University and UMC Utrecht. After studying biology at Utrecht University, she obtained her PhD in microbiology, studying sporulation- inhibited secretion in Aspergillus, in 2013. After two post-docs in Mycelium Design, in which she analysed the characteristics of pure and composite mycelium materials, she now works as lecturer, policy advisor and coordinator on several bachelor’s and master’s courses. Furthermore, she is the master’s programme coordinator for Bio Inspired Innovation, and one of the initiators of the Maker space of Utrecht University, Lili’s Proto Lab.
Sophie C. Kromholz
is an independent creative researcher and feminist art historian. She has taught and lectured internationally, including at University of Glasgow and Maastricht University. Her current work connects with psychogeography, exploring how our interaction with our immediate surroundings and landscape informs the stories we tell, and who we become. Running themes in her work include collecting practices, accessibility, and erasure. Published texts include ‘Collectible: The social and ethical implications surrounding the collected object,’ in Art, cultural heritage and the market: Ethical and legal issues (V. Vadi & H. E. G. S. Schneider, eds., Heidelberg 2014); ‘Living in the material world – making sense of material matters in relation to temporary artworks’, North Street review, issue: ‘Modulating materiality’ (2016); ‘What’s the matter? – Deconstructing the material lives of experience driven artworks’, AM: Journal of art and media studies, No. 10 (2016); ‘Absence makes the heart grow fonder: rethinking intentional material loss in temporary art’, Studies in theatre and performance, 38, No. 3 (2018), 224–237.
Esther Leslie
is Professor of Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck, University of London. Her interests lie in the poetics of science and imbrications of politics and technologies, with a particular focus on the work of Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, as well as the poetics of science, European literary and visual modernism and avant gardes, animation and colour. Current work focuses on turbid media and the aesthetics of turbulence. Her books include various studies and translations of Walter Benjamin, as well as Hollywood flatlands: Animation, critical theory and the avant garde (London 2002); Synthetic worlds: Nature, art and the chemical industry (London 2005); Derelicts: Thought worms from the wreckage (London 2014), Liquid crystals: The science and art of a fluid form (London 2016) and Deeper in the pyramid (with Melanie Jackson, London 2018) and, with Jackson, The inextinguishable (Limerick, 2021).
Isabella Lores-Chavez
is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University, writing her dissertation on the circulation, use, and depiction of plaster casts in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic. She is the 2020–2022 Samuel H. Kress Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA). In 2018–2019, she was the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Theodore Rousseau Fellow in European Paintings. In 2013, she curated a small exhibition of drawings at the Metropolitan, entitled Dutch and French genre drawings from the Robert Lehman Collection. Isabella received her Bachelor of Arts in Art History from Yale University.
Anna Maerker
is a Reader in the History of Science, Technology and Medicine at King’s College London, working on the material and visual culture of science with a focus on anatomical models and collections, on constructions of expertise and authority in science, and on the role of history in public life. She is the author of Model experts: Wax anatomies and Enlightenment in Florence and Vienna, 1775–1815 (Manchester 2011), and co-editor of History, memory and public life: The past in the present (London 2018).
Sophie Pitman
is the Pleasant Rowland Textile Specialist and Research Director of the Helen Louise Allen Textile Collection, based at the Center for Design and Material Culture (University of Wisconsin-Madison). Previously she was a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow (University College London) and has held postdoctoral research positions on two major projects, The Making and Knowing Project (Columbia University) and Refashioning the Renaissance (Aalto University). A cultural historian of early modern Europe, with a particular interest in material culture, she is currently working on publications about reconstruction as a methodology, imitation textiles, weatherproof clothing, and London’s emergence as a fashion city.
Valentina Pugliano
is a Lecturer and Research Associate in History and the Program in Science, Technology and Society at MIT. Previously, she was a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science of Cambridge University and a Junior Research Fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge. She is currently working on two books: the first based on her doctorate, completed at Oxford University, on the role of apothecaries and pharmacies in the development of early modern natural history; and a second on the diplomatic medicine of the Venetian Republic in the eastern Mediterranean and the Levant, and its intellectual exchanges with Mamluks and Ottomans, c.1400–1730.
Erik Rietveld
is a Socrates Professor in Philosophy at the University of Twente and the University of Amsterdam (Amsterdam UMC, Dept. of Psychiatry / Philosophy). Previously he was a Fellow in Philosophy at Harvard University. He works on the philosophy of skilled action, change-ability, and ecological psychology. Rietveld has been awarded an ERC Starting Grant and VENI, VIDI and VICI grants by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). Together with his brother Ronald Rietveld he founded the multidisciplinary collective for visual art, experimental architecture and philosophy RAAAF in 2006. They were responsible for Vacant NL, the successful Dutch contribution to the Venice Architecture Biennale 2010. He is a member of The Society of Arts of The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW).
Marlise Rijks
is a historian specialising in art, science, and technology of the early modern period. She is an assistant professor at the VUB (Vrije Universiteit Brussels) and a postdoc researcher at Ghent University, working on the project ‘Printing images in the early modern Low Countries. Patents, copyrights, and the separation of art and technology’, funded by FWO. From 2016 to 2020 she worked at Leiden University on the NWO-funded project ‘A new history of fishes. A long-term approach to fishes in science and culture, 1550–1800’. She has also worked at Utrecht University, the Centrum Rubenianum in Antwerp, and the Huygens ING in The Hague, and held fellowships at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, the Science History Institute in Philadelphia, and the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel. She has published widely on the history of collections, natural history, and workshop knowledge. Her recently published monograph is titled Artists’ and artisans’ collections in early modern Antwerp. Catalysts of innovation (Turnhout & London, 2022).
Zuzanna Sarnecka
is assistant professor at the University of Warsaw. Her research focuses on the relationship between devotion and craftsmanship in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italian art. She currently leads a three-year project funded by the Polish National Science Centre on devotional terracotta sculpture in the Papal States, 1450–1550. She collaborated on the ERC – funded project Domestic devotions: The place of piety in the Italian Renaissance home, 1400–1600 (University of Cambridge), and on The agency of things. New perspectives on European art of the fourteenth-sixteenth centuries (University of Warsaw). She has published on the Della Robbia family and maiolica sculptures by anonymous artists in edited volumes from Brill, Routledge and Viella, and has articles in Word & image, Artibus et historiae, Faenza and Religions. Her monograph is titled The allure of glazed terracotta in Renaissance Italy (Turnhout, 2021).
Emilie Skulberg
is a PhD candidate at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge. Her area of research is images in science, and she specialises in visual representations in astrophysics from the 1960s to the present. The focus of her current research is the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration and the history of images of the surroundings of black holes.
Pamela H. Smith
Seth Low Professor of History, Columbia University, is founding Director of the Center for Science and Society and The Making and Knowing Project (M&K). Her articles and books, especially The body of the artisan (Chicago 2004), Ways of making and knowing (ed. P. H. Smith, A. R. W. Meyers and H. Cook, Ann Arbor, 2017), and From lived experience to the written word: Recovering skill and art (Chicago 2022), examine craft knowledge. Her edited volume The matter of art (ed. C. Anderson, A. Dunlop, P. H. Smith, Manchester 2016) treats materiality, making and meaning, and Entangled itineraries: Materials, practices, and knowledges across Eurasia (Pittsburgh 2019) deals with the movement of materials and techniques across Eurasia. In the collaborative research M&K Project, she and the M&K Team investigate practical knowledge through text-, object-, and laboratory-based research, and released a digital critical edition and English translation of BnF Ms. Fr. 640, Secrets of craft and nature in Renaissance France (2020).
Martin Sparre
obtained his PhD at University of Copenhagen in 2015 and is now a postdoc at Potsdam University (Germany). He is a researcher in astrophysics and has 45 peer-reviewed papers on astrophysics and galaxy formation simulations.
E. C. Spary
is Professor in the History of Modern Knowledge at the University of Cambridge. An historian of science, her interests range over the history of natural history, medicine and chemistry between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries. Her monographs include Utopia’s garden (Chicago 2000), Eating the Enlightenment (Chicago 2012) and Feeding France (Cambridge 2014), and she has co-edited several collections.
Lisbet Tarp
is fixed-term associate professor at Aarhus University and currently PI on the research project Digital art history: Rediscovering the painting (2019–2022) executed at The National Gallery in Denmark due to grants from The Danish Council for Independent Research and The New Carlsberg Foundation. The project focuses upon the intersection between art history, digital humanities, and conservation. Tarp holds a PhD in art history and she has published in the field of early modern studies concerning aspects of European decorative arts and the Danish collector Ole Worm (1588–1654). Motivated by her interests in art theory, notions of materials, and natural philosophy, she has been a visiting scholar at the departments of art history at Universität Hamburg and Johns Hopkins University. Furthermore, she has received a research fellowship from the Novo Nordisk Foundation (2015–2018).
Maximilien Urfer
graduated from EDHEA in 2000, and studied at the Caen Art School before starting practice in a Paris-based studio for three years. His artistic work is articulated through diverse media, including photography, video, sound, painting, writing and performance. He was recently awarded the Artpro Grant (2017–2021) for his Agrisculpture project. He has also wrote and directed a 60-minute film in 2018, commissioned by the Media Library-Valais of Martigny, which focused on alpine-related natural risks and related themes as explored within Swiss literature. As an Artistic Collaborator at EDHEA, Maximilien teaches the basics of video medium, including editing, shooting, post-production, and staging.
Kristin Veel
is Associate Professor at the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen. Veel’s research engages with invisibilities, uncertainties, overload, and the gigantic in contemporary cultural imagination. Her most recent book, coauthored with Henriette Steiner, is Tower to tower: Gigantism in architecture and digital culture (Cambridge, Mass., 2020). She is Principal Investigator of the Uncertain Archives project and a founding member of the Uncertain Archives research group.
