Team
Jennifer Spinks
Jenny Spinks is Hansen Associate Professor in History at the University of Melbourne. She researches northern Europe 1450-1700, with a focus on print culture and material culture, and the social and religious impact of disasters and wonders. She has co-curated exhibitions of early modern print at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne and the John Rylands Library in Manchester. Her publications include Monstrous Births and Visual Culture in Sixteenth-Century Germany (2009, pbk 2016), co-edited and co-authored books, and articles in journals including Renaissance Studies, Past & Present, and Art History. She has held research fellowships at the Warburg Institute, The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, and the Herzog August Bibliothek. Jenny is team leader of this Australian Research Council project. Her own research areas include an examination of material culture in Dürer’s Nemesis engraving; book culture in Nuremberg; and the ways in which rare books and prints from Nuremberg entered Melbourne collections.
CHIEF INVESTIGATOR
Charles Zika
Charles Zika is Professorial Fellow in History, University of Melbourne and was a Foundation Chief Investigator in the ARC Centre for the History of Emotions (2011–18). He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, has held visiting residential fellowships at the Lichtenberg Kolleg, University of Göttingen, CASVA, National Gallery of Art, Washington, and Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel. He is an editor of Late Medieval and Early Modern Studies (Brepols) and on advisory/editorial boards that include Emotions: History, Culture, Society (Brill), Hexenforschung (Verlag für Regionalgeschichte), History of Emotions (Bloomsbury) and Parergon (UWA). His interests lie in the intersections of religion, emotion, visual culture and print. Current research focuses on the pilgrimage shrine of Mariazell, religious objects and Dürer prints, the visual history of the witch of Endor, and dancing in witchcraft iconography. He has co-curated exhibitions on Love: Art of Emotion (2017) and Apocalypse and Disaster (2012) at the National Gallery of Victoria.
CHIEF INVESTIGATOR
Matthew Champion
Matthew Champion is a Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Melbourne. After completing his doctoral studies at Queen Mary University of London, Matthew held a Junior Research Fellowship at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, and a tenured Lectureship in Medieval History at Birkbeck, University of London. In 2020, he returned to Australia to take up an ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (‘The Sounds of Time’) at the Australian Catholic University, Melbourne. His first book, The Fullness of Time: Temporalities of the Fifteenth-Century Low Countries was awarded the 2018 Gladstone Prize from the Royal Historical Society. Matthew is currently working on Dürer’s interactions with the material culture of measurement, with a particular emphasis on Nuremberg’s instruments for measuring weight and time.
CHIEF INVESTIGATOR
Dagmar Eichberger
Following her studies at the University of Heidelberg, Dagmar Eichberger spent ten years teaching and researching at Australian universities. Supported by a three-year ARC grant, she analyzed the art collection of Margaret of Austria (Leben mit Kunst – Wirken durch Kunst. Sammelwesen und Hofkunst unter Margarete von Österreich, 2002). She has taught at the universities of Saarbrücken, Jena, Konstanz, Heidelberg, Trier, Giessen, Paris and Vienna. Since 2021, she has been professor emerita at the University of Heidelberg. She has been involved in several exhibitions and conference volumes, including Albrecht Dürer in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria (1994), Women of Distinction: Margaret of York and Margaret of Austria (2005), Women, The Art of Power: Three women from the House of Habsburg (2018, with A. Jordan Gschwend). Her publications include several articles on Albrecht Dürer. In addition, she has produced edited volumes with Charles Zika, Anne-Marie Legaré, Jennifer Spinks, Philippe Lorentz, Shelley Perlove and Annemarie Jordan Gschwend.
PARTNER INVESTIGATOR
Stefan Hanß
Stefan Hanß is Professor of Early Modern History at The University of Manchester, as well as Deputy Director and Scientific Lead of The John Rylands Research Institute, Manchester. His research focuses on early modern material culture and global history. Hanß is the recipient of a British Academy Rising Star Engagement Award and a Philip Leverhulme Prize in History. His research explores new trajectories and tools in material culture studies such as the use of digital microscopes and remaking experiments. He is currently writing a monograph on the early modern history of hair (see these articles) and continuing his research on feathers. Publications cover early modern featherworkers, the arrival of New World feathers in Renaissance Europe, aviculture and ornithology in early modern Germany, and the early modern global circulation of feathers. Hanß has also published widely on the Battle of Lepanto, Mediterranean slavery, and Ottoman-European interactions, as well as on concepts of time. For this project, Hanß examines Albrecht Dürer’s engagement with the materiality of birds in the context of the material and intellectual environment of Renaissance Nuremberg.
PARTNER INVESTIGATOR
Sasha Handley
Professor Sasha Handley, University of Manchester, is a historian of early modern society and culture largely focused on the British Isles. Her interests include histories of daily life (especially the history of sleeping practices), women’s history, environmental history, the history of the body, and supernatural beliefs and practices. An interest in new historical methodologies – material culture and histories of emotion – unites these research themes. For this project, Sasha’s focus is on the relationship between the material culture of domestic households in Renaissance Nuremberg and Dürer's art. Sasha has published widely in leading academic journals (e.g. History Workshop Journal, Journal of the History of Ideas, Cultural and Social History, Interface Focus) and her monographs include Sleep in Early Modern England (Yale University Press, 2016) and Visions of an Unseen World: Ghost Beliefs and Ghost Stories in Eighteenth-Century England (Pickering & Chatto, 2007; Routledge, 2016). Sasha co-edited the Social History Society’s book series New Directions in Social and Cultural History, published by Bloomsbury, and she is a co-editor of its inaugural book, New Directions in Social and Cultural History (2018).
PARTNER INVESTIGATOR
Edward Wouk
Edward H. Wouk, Head of Department of Art History and Cultural Practices at the University of Manchester, is active as a scholar, teacher, and curator of early modern art with a focus on print. His research examines the roles of images, objects, and narratives in constructing identities within early modern Europe and beyond its borders. His publications on the history of print and print culture are wide-ranging and include the New Hollstein volumes devoted to the graphic work of Frans Floris (2011) and a co-edited volume of essays, Prints in Translation: Image, Materiality, Space, with Suzanne Karr Schmidt (Routledge, 2017). He also co-curated the major international loan exhibition Marcantonio Raimondi and Raphael at the Whitworth (2016–2017) and edited the accompanying catalogue, which includes contributions by international scholars and University of Manchester students. He is the author of the first English-language monograph on Frans Floris (2017) and a critical edition of the first Netherlandish treatises on the arts, Dominicus Lampsonius’s Life of Lambert Lombard and Effigies cycle (Getty, 2021). He is currently completing a monograph on art writing practices in the early modern Low Countries.
PARTNER INVESTIGATOR
Project Associates
WEB DESIGNER / RESEARCH ASSOCIATE
Nat Cutter
Nat Cutter is an early career historian and digital humanist based at the University of Melbourne, researching diplomatic, economic, cultural and military interactions between early modern Britain and the Maghreb, as well as new methods of cultural data management and research infrastructure. He is interested in cross-cultural engagement, social networking, media representations, diplomacy, religion, digital humanities and piracy. Nat has published on the representations of Maghrebi diversity and relations with Europe in English periodical news, information flows between Britain and the Maghreb, and social life and community among expatriates in Ottoman Tunis and Tripoli. He is a founding contributor to Medieval and Early Modern Orients, an international academic network and digital project for exploring early modern encounters between England and Islamic worlds. In 2021, Nat won the Hakluyt Society Essay Prize and an ASECS-Folger Shakespeare Library Fellowship, and in 2022 he takes up the inaugural ANZAMEMS Early Career Fellowship and Short-Term Fellowship at the Huntington Library, California.
Holly Fletcher
Holly Fletcher is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Manchester working on the Wellcome Trust funded project ‘Sleeping Well in the Early Modern World’. Her research focuses on the history of the body and its entanglements with the material world in the early modern period. Holly completed her PhD at the University of Cambridge in 2020 with a thesis examining the cultural significance of body size in early modern Germany, including a chapter on Albrecht Dürer’s study of bodily proportion. She has published on the significance of fatness and the belly in the Lutheran Reformation, as well the ageing female body in German sculpture from the 1520s. Drawing on her interest in sculpture, Holly has researched and written about a sculpted wooden Pieta from Renaissance Germany which appears in the exhibition ‘Albrecht Dürer’s Material World’ at the Whitworth, 2023-2024. Her essay on this piece is published in the exhibition catalogue and she is assisting the team with research into several other objects included in the exhibition.
RESEARCH ASSOCIATE
Shannon Gilmore-Kuziow
Shannon Gilmore-Kuziow is a research assistant for this project and co-curator of the exhibition that will be held in Melbourne. She is a teaching associate in the History Department at the University of Melbourne and an early career researcher specializing in the religious art and architecture of Renaissance Italy. Her research focuses on viewers’ somatic and affective engagement with the material world, the function of devotional art in vernacular cultures, and the creative role that rituals play in shaping religious sites and objects. After receiving her PhD in 2019 from the University of California, Santa Barbara, she held a three-year postdoctoral fellowship at Australian Catholic University in Melbourne. At ACU, she worked with Peter Howard (CI) on the Australian Research Council Discovery project, ‘The Sistine Chapel and the Visual Art of Preaching’. Sole-authored articles derived from her research for the Sistine project will appear in Renaissance Quarterly and Sixteenth Century Journal. She is currently completing a monograph that examines fifteenth-century devotional movements surrounding Tuscan miracle-working images of the Virgin Mary.
RESEARCH ASSOCIATE
Danielle Gravon
Danielle Gravon is a research assistant on this project, working to compile images, image data, and permissions for the exhibition catalogue. Last year she completed a Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Manchester with the aid of the Belgian American Educational Foundation Fellowship, the Henriques Scholarship, and the JB Harley Fellowship in the History of Cartography. She is currently teaching Art History, Printmaking, and Digital Design at Concordia College Moorhead and Minnesota State Community and Technical College.
RESEARCH ASSOCIATE
Jenny Smith
Jenny Smith is a research assistant on this project and a PhD student at Monash University, with a thesis on the mirror as a metaphor in sixteenth-century England. Following an MA at the University of Melbourne, she has managed Engineering collections at the University of Melbourne, curating several exhibitions and researching collection items such as a pocket mechanical calculator, and worked extensively in libraries and research support at Melbourne and Monash. Her current focus is on metaphor in early modern Europe, and more broadly in the history of ideas and their expression in language and literature. She has written on the figure of the fool, lunacy, and the mirrors of Prudence, publishing work on mirrors in counsel and on birds as a symbol of truth and dissimulation.
RESEARCH ASSOCIATE
Hannah Spracklan-Holl
Hannah Spracklan-Holl is a research assistant on the project "Albrecht Dürer's Material World". While completing her doctoral studies in Musicology at the University of Melbourne, she was a doctoral research fellow at the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel. Her primary areas of research interest are music at early modern German courts, noblewomen's networks of knowledge in the early modern period, and multimedia events, politics, and diplomacy. She has published on the music of Duchess Sophie Elisabeth of Braunschweig-Lüneburg, evidence of noblewomen's music-making in seventeenth-century manuscripts, astrology and instrumental affect, and music and ideas of German nationalism after the Thirty Years' War.
RESEARCH ASSOCIATE