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
2022 Alina Payne Harvard University
“Architecture in Two Dimensions"
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).