Bross Lectures

The Bross Lectures is endowed in memory of alumna Louise Smith Bross (PhD '94). They are presented every three years by a distinguished scholar of pre-1800 European art and result in a book-length publication.

2026 Christopher Wood New York University

Forthcoming

2018 Milette Gaifman Yale University

“Classification and the History of Greek Art”

  • “How to View a Dionysiac Monument”
  • “The Limits of Taxonomy”
  • “The Unclassified Past”

                       

2015 Jeffrey Hamburger Harvard University

“Visible Theology: Diagrams and the Dynamics of Medieval Thought”

  • “Diagrams as Paradigm: The Diagrammatic Mode in Medieval Art”
  • “From Cross to Crucifix: Rereading Hrabanus Maurus’s in Honor of the Holy Cross in the Late Thirteenth Century”
  • “Marian Diagrams and Dominican Devotion: Berthold of Nuremberg’s Supplement to Hrabanus Maurus”

Published as Diagramming Devotion: Berthold of Nuremberg’s Transformation of Hrabanus Maurus’s Poems in Praise of the Cross (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020).

2012 Stephen Campbell Johns Hopkins University

“Inventions of Place: Rethinking the Geography of Italian Art in the Age of Lotto and Titian”

  • “Re-mapping the Italian Renaissance”
  • “Distant Cities: Lorenzo Lotto, Gaudenzio Ferrari, and Making of Sacred Landscape”
  • “Sacred Naturalism and the Art of Moretto and Savoldo”
  • “Against Titian”

Published as The Endless Periphery: Toward a Geopolitics of Art in Lorenzo Lotto’s Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019).

2009 Susan E. Alcock Brown University

“Some Archaeologies of Surveillance”

  • “Scanning and Planning: Modern Modes of Watching the Ancient World”
  • “Spying and Crying: Ancient Modes of Watching the Ancient World”
  • “The Utility of Surveillance: Case Studies and Observations”

2007 Joseph Koerner Courtauld Institute of Art

“Enemy Painting: Enmity and the Unspeakable Subject”

2003 Victor Stoichita University of Fribourg

Published as The Pygmalion Effect: From Ovid to Hitchcock (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

2000 Martin Kemp Oxford University

Published as The Human Animal in Western Art and Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).