My area of research is the art and material culture of early modern Northern Europe. I have published on Renaissance aesthetics, the history of collecting, intersections of art and science, theories of ornament, aspects of the early modern domestic interior, and on the Reformation and the arts. My current research focuses on works of art and craft made for the Kunstkammer of sixteenth-century northern Europe, and in particular on the knowledge base and intellectual aspirations of the elite craftsmen who made them: urban, educated, inventive, intellectually curious, and fired by the values of humanism—whose interests intersected with those of their courtly patrons and whose creations gave material shape to the philosophical speculations and enquiries about the world that arose within the Kunstkammer’s milieu.

Selected Recent Publications

“The Place of Colour in Martin Schaffner’s Universe Table.” In Early Modern Colour Worlds, edited by Tawrin Baker, Sven Dupré, Sachiko Kusukawa, and Karin Leonhard. Leiden: Brill, 2016.

“Domestic Decoration and the Bible in the Early Modern Home.” In The Oxford Handbook to the Bible in England, c. 1520-1700, edited by Kevin Killeen, Helen Smith, and Rachel Willie. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.

“Jonas Silber’s Universe Cup and its Sources.” In Visual Acuity and the Arts in Early Modern Germany, edited by Jeffrey Chipps Smith. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014.

“Object, Material, Myth: Ovidian Poetics and Natural Philosophy in the Sixteenth-Century Northern European Kunstkammer.” In The Challenge of the Object / Die Herausforderung des Objekts, edited b G. Ulrich Grossman and Petra Krutisch, The Proceedings of the 33rd Congress of the International Committee of the History of Art. Nuremberg: Germanischen Nationalmuseums, 2013.

“Die Rezeption Dürers und seiner Kunst im Venedig des frühen sechzehnten Jahrhunderts.” In Albrecht Dürer. Seine Kunst im Kontext Ihrer Zeit , ex. cat., Städel Museum, Frankfurt-am-Main, 23 October 2013 – 2 February 2014, 2013.

Field editor and contributing author, “Renaissance Europe, 1400-1600.” In A History of the Decorative Arts, edited by Pat Kirkham and Susan Weber. New York and New Haven: Bard Graduate Center and Yale University Press, 2013.

“Inscriptional Wisdom and the Domestic Arts in Early Modern Northern Europe.” In Konstruktion, Manifestation und Dynamik der Formelhaftigkeit in Text und Bild: Historische Perspektiven und moderne Technologien, edited by Natalia Filatkina, Birgit Ulrike Münch, and Ane Kleine. Beiträge zu Historischen Kulturwissenschaften, Universität Trier, 2012.

Selected Courses

541 Northern European Interiors, 1550–1680

584 Survey of European Ceramics, 1400 to 1900

621 The Renaissance Discovery of the World: Collecting and Collections in the Early Modern Era

624 Classicism in the North, 1500–1620

741 Renaissance Mythologies

846 Objects of Knowledge: Renaissance Ornament and Society in Northern Europe, 1500-1650

866 Transalpine Renaissances

894 Objects of Belief: Religion and the Arts of Northern Europe 1450-1600

899 The Culture of Prints in Early Modern Europe

908 Artists, Craftsmen, and the Pursuit of Nature in Renaissance Europe

918 Material Culture and Social Life in the Early Modern Home, 1500–1700