Professor Diana Bullen Presciutti

Biography

Diana Presciutti's primary research addresses the visual culture of social problems in late medieval and early modern 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. Her recently published second book, Saints, Miracles, and Social Problems in Italian Renaissance Art (Cambridge University Press, 2023), 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. Diana has published research articles in Art History, Artibus et Historiae, the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Renaissance Quarterly and Renaissance Studies, as well as several chapters in edited collections. She is also the editor of Space, Place, and Motion: Locating Confraternities in the Late Medieval and Early Modern City (Brill Press, 2017). Her research has been supported by fellowships and grants from Villa I Tatti: The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Renaissance Society of America, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, the Italian Art Society, and the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation.

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)