Biography
Niall Atkinson’s teaching and scholarship focus on public space, urban history, soundscapes, geography and travel, as well as the architecture and urbanism of late Medieval and Renaissance Italy.
Current research projects include “The Wandering Body and the Wondering Eye: Early Modern Travel and the Art of Describing,” considering how early modern Mediterranean travelers, often disoriented and at the mercy of the elements, developed vernacular techniques for describing unfamiliar landscapes as integrated systems of human design and nature. By the 15th century, these practices had been absorbed into architectural thinking about ideal urban design, laying groundwork for the more rationalized notion of “territory” central to the modern state. The companion “Narrated Landscapes” applies experimental computational text analysis to multilingual travel accounts. Using the spatial technique Narrative Ribbons, Atkinson and Brooke Luetgert investigate how linguistic, religious, and cultural traditions shape shared places across journeys. With Carmen Caswell, Atkinson is working on CATASTO (Communities, Architecture, and Technology Aligning in Space and Time Online), drawing on property data from the 1427 tax census (Catasto) in the Florentine State Archives to build a digital topography of Renaissance Florence at the height of its artistic and architectural achievement. Atkinson also collaborates on “Florence Illuminated,” which federates five digital humanities projects about Renaissance Florence onto a shared cartographic platform with a common data schema. The initiative addresses a persistent gap in the digital humanities: the ability to share data and infrastructure across related archival and technical projects.
In 2019, Atkinson was the Geddes Visiting Fellow at the School of Architecture at the University of Edinburgh. He received the President’s Citation for creative and curatorial work representing Chicago in 2018 as one of the curators, with Ann Lui, of the US Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale (American Institute of Architects). His research has been supported by the National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH), the Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, Villa I Tatti; the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society at the University of Chicago; the Samuel H. Kress Foundation; and the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz. In 2018, Niall was honored with the Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching and Mentoring at the University of Chicago.
