Visiting Lecturer

Chriscinda Henry is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago. She will serve as Visiting Lecturer in our department in spring 2007. She focuses on Early Modern art and cultural history, with a specialization in 16th-century Italy, particularly Venice. Her dissertation, “Vernacular Painting: Art and Popular Culture in Renaissance Venice, 1500-1550,” examines connections between genre painting and Venetian social and cultural life, arguing for the symbolic role of images in expressing Venetian identity. Her broader research interests include the study of Carnival and street entertainment as performance art, the socio-political dimensions of patronage and display, the relationship of “high” art to popular prints, and the shared substance and modality of vernacular art, poetry, music, and theater. An essay, “‘Whorish Civility’ and Other Tricks of Seduction in Venetian Courtesan Representation,” will appear in the volume, Sex Acts: Practice, Performance and Perversion in Early Modern Italy, in 2008. During the academic year 2006-07, Ms. Henry was Fulbright Fellow in Italy.

cch@uchicago.edu