SPAH Seminar Series: Dr Diana Bullen Presciutti

The Philosophy and Art History Research Seminar meets weekly in term on Thursday afternoons to discuss a paper by a visiting philosopher, art historian, or a member of our academic staff.

This week's speaker is University of Essex senior lecturer, Dr Diana Bullen Presciutti.

Diana's primary research addresses the visual culture of social problems in Renaissance Italy, focusing on popular piety, civic ideology, urban ritual, and intersections of class, gender, and cultural production. Her first monograph, Visual Cultures of Foundling Care in Renaissance Italy (Ashgate/Routledge, 2015), explored how visual culture both framed the social problem of infant abandonment and promoted the charitable work of the foundling hospital. She is currently at work on a second book, The Saint as Social Worker: Visual Hagiography and Social Problems in Renaissance Italy, that contends that the visual representation of saints' miracles served in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as a vehicle for contesting the public image of a number of pressing social problems--problems like slander, madness, vendetta, and illegitimacy.

The seminar will be followed by informal drinks at Top Bar and a meal.