Scarlett H. Strauss

PhD Candidate

Areas of interest: Research interests: Late medieval and Renaissance Italy, especially sacred paintings; anthropology of ritual; metapictoriality; phenomenology; performance theory; social history; visuality.

Scarlett H. Strauss is a PhD Candidate in Italian Renaissance art history. Her dissertation focuses on sacred paintings made for contested sites between Florence and Siena in the late 14th and 15th centuries. This project reconstructs the agency of patrons in subject towns and the importance of multifaceted local identities, offering a new perspective on the traditional city-focused approach to regional schools of painting. She has taught both at NYU and at Barnard College, and her article “Contested Borders and the Representation of Subject Towns Between Florence and Siena” is forthcoming in Artium Quaestiones this year.