Biography
Lia Markey (MA University of Chicago 2002; Ph.D. University of Chicago 2008) is the Director of the Center for Renaissance Studies at Chicago’s Newberry Library where she is responsible for conferences, symposia, workshops, seminars, and digital humanities projects devoted to medieval and early modern studies. Currently, she is conducting research for an exhibition provisionally entitled “Seeing Race Before Race,” co-curated with Noémie Ndiaye (University of Chicago), Rebecca Fall (Newberry Library), and Christopher Fletcher (Newberry Library) and scheduled for fall 2023.
Dr. Markey’s research examines cross-cultural exchange between Italy and the Americas in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, collecting history, and early modern prints and drawings. Most recently, she has published Imagining the Americas in Medici Florence (Penn State University Press, 2016) and a co-edited volume The New World in Early Modern Italy, 1492-1750 (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Her edited volume, Renaissance Invention: Stradanus’s “Nova Reperta” (Northwestern University Press, 2020) complemented the Newberry Library’s fall 2020 exhibition by the same title and includes catalog entries as well as contributions from a related Newberry symposium.
Dr. Markey has taught at Northwestern University, the University of Pennsylvania, and at Princeton University and held fellowships at the Folger Library, the Warburg Institute, Harvard's Villa I Tatti, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Herzog August Bibliothek. She currently participates in the Getty Connecting Art Histories Research Group, “Spanish Italy and the Iberian New World.”
