Lia Markey

Biography

Lia Markey (MA Syracuse University in Florence 2001; 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.

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. Publications include 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. Most recently, she co-curated the Newberry exhibition Seeing Race Before Race and co-edited a volume with the same name with Noémie Ndiaye (2023).

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, the Herzog August Bibliothek, and the European University Institute in Florence. She is currently working on articles and books related to the conception of Mannerism, cartography, and Medici patronage and she is involved in two collaborative projects focused on the slave trader Francesco Carletti and the naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi.

Publications

“Introduction: Inventing the Nova Reperta,” in Renaissance Invention: Stradanus’s Nova Reperta 

Northwestern University Press
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2020

The New World in Early Modern Italy, 1492-1750 (with Elizabeth Horodowich), Cambridge University Press, 2017

Cambridge University Press
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2017

Imagining the Americas in Medici Florence 

Penn State University Press
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2016

Italian Master Drawings from the Princeton University Art Museum (Laura Giles and Claire Van Cleave), Yale University Press, 2014

Yale University Press
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2014

“Introduction” in Seeing Race Before Race: Visual Culture and the Racial Matrix in the Premodern World, eds. Noemie Ndiaye and Lia Markey (Tempe: ACMRS Press, 2023) (co-authored with Noémie Ndiaye).

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“A Scholar-Collector in Mid-Century Chicago: The Books of Bernard Weinberg” in Beyond Aristotle’s Poetic in the Italian Renaissance (London: Bloombury, 2020). (co-authored with Eufemia Baldassarre and Paul Gehl)

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“A New World Disease and Therapy: Stradanus’s Guaiacum Engraving” in Renaissance Invention: Stradanus’s Nova Reperta (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2020). (co-authored with Alessandra Foscati)

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Renaissance Invention: Stradanus’s Nova Reperta (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2020)

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“The Future of Premodern Studies: A View from the Newberry” I Tatti Studies Special Edition, Fields of the Future/Future of the Field, vol. 22, no. 2 (Fall 2019).

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“The Medievalists and the Early Modernists: A World Divided?,” in A World within Worlds? Reassessing the “Global Turn” in Medieval Art, special edition of The Medieval Globe, ed. Christina Normore (2018). (co-authored with Jessica Keating)

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“The Medievalists and the Early Modernists: A World Divided?,” in A World within Worlds? Reassessing the “Global Turn” in Medieval Art, special edition of The Medieval Globe, ed. Christina Normore (2018). (co-authored with Jessica Keating)

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A Feather Painting of Montezuma, Captured by a Sea Captain and Destined for a Medici,” in The Significance of Small Things, eds. Luisa Elena Alcalà and Ken Moser (Madrid: El Viso Ediciones, 2018).

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“Aldrovandi’s New World Natives in Bologna (or how to draw the unseen al vivo)” The New World in Early Modern Italy, 1492-1750, eds. Elizabeth Horodowich and Lia Markey (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017): 225-248.

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“Italy’s Virtual Discovery: an Introduction” in The New World in Early Modern Italy, 1492-1750, eds. Elizabeth Horodowich and Lia Markey (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017): 1-16. (co-authored with Elizabeth Horodowich)

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Exhibitions

Seeing Race Before Race, Newberry Library, September 8-December 29, 2023

Renaissance Invention: Stradanus’s Nova Reperta, Newberry Library, April 18-July 3, 2020

Profiles

Andrei Pop
Andrei Pop
Modern Art and Aesthetics
Department Chair
CWAC 162 | Tuesdays 1-2pm or by appointment.
773.702.0278
Niall Atkinson
Niall Atkinson
Medieval and Renaissance Architecture and Urban History
CWAC 260
773.702.0270
Wei-Cheng Lin
Wei-Cheng Lin
Chinese Art and Architecture
Architectural Studies Advisor
CWAC 268 | Office Hours: Wednesdays 9-10am and 12-1pm
773.702.0268
2006-07
Iowa State University
Assistant Professor, East Asian Art and Architecture
Potters Wheel
Richard Neer
Ancient Greek Art and Architecture
CWAC 259
773.702.5890
Megan Sullivan
Megan Sullivan
Modern and Contemporary Latin American Art
CWAC 272
773.702.5126