Sophia Bevacqua

PhD Candidate

Areas of interest: Early Modern European art, especially works on paper; the advent of drawing; concepts of metamorphosis, hybridity, and myth; materialized encounters with the Ottoman and Safavid worlds; hydrographic networks of paper; intersections of artistic practice and philosophy; the quattrocento origins of virtuality, entropy, and feedback.

Sophia Bevacqua is a first-year PhD student at the Institute. Her research explores the unstable, metamorphic image in realm of works on paper in the Early Modern period, with a particular focus on Italian schizzi from the 15 th -17 th centuries. 

Bevacqua is currently the Managing Editor of the journal I Tatti Studies. In 2018 and 2019 she was the California Chapter Fellow at the Vatican Museums. Her research has also been supported by The Klesch Collection Foundation. 

Recently, she has assisted with the exhibition Piranesi on the Page (Princeton University, Firestone Library, 2021). She has previously held a museum position at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London. 

She holds a B.A. from the University of Notre Dame, summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, and a M.A. from the Institute of Fine Arts. Her undergraduate honors thesis, “Watteau’s Interpellation of His Female Viewer” was awarded the Radwin Riley Art History Prize.