Steering Committee
Jyoti Gulati Balachandran, Assistant Professor of History, Penn State
Jyoti Gulati Balachandran is a historian of early modern South Asia and the western Indian Ocean with specific interest in the social and cultural histories of Muslim communities. She is the author of Narrative Pasts: The Making of a Muslim Community in Gujarat, c. 1450-1650 (Oxford, 2020). Her current project concerns the history of scholarly networks and knowledge transmission between western India and the Red Sea region in the sixteenth century.
Madhuri Desai, Associate Professor of Art History and Asian Studies, Penn State
Madhuri Desai’s research interests are in the area of South Asian architectural and urban history. Her first monograph Banaras Reconstructed: Architecture and Sacred Space in a Hindu Holy City (University of Washington Press, 2017) received the 2019 Alice Davis Hitchcock Award from the Society of Architectural Historians. She is a recipient of several fellowships, including from CASVA (National Gallery), the Social Science Research Council, and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art (London).
Faisal Husain, Assistant Professor of History, Penn State
Faisal Husain is an environmental and Ottoman historian focusing on the period between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. He is the author of Rivers of the Sultan: The Tigris and Euphrates in the Ottoman Empire (2021), which examines the political and environmental consequences of the Ottoman establishment of a unified imperial regime over the Tigris and Euphrates rivers from the early sixteenth century. His second book project is an environmental history of Ottoman frontier expansion in eastern Anatolia and Iraq.
Elizabeth Mansfield, Professor and Head of Art History, Penn State
A specialist in 18th– and 19th-century European art and historiography, her books include The Perfect Foil: François-André Vincent and the Revolution in French Painting and Too Beautiful to Picture: Zeuxis, Myth, and Mimesis. She has held academic appointments at New York University and at Sewanee: The University of the South. More recently, she was a Senior Program Officer at the Getty Foundation and Vice President for Scholarly Programs at the National Humanities Center.
Daniel Leonhard Purdy, Professor of German Studies, Director of the Max Kade German-American Research Institute, and Co-Director of Visual Studies, Penn State
Daniel Purdy’s research specializes on the connections between material culture and philosophical thought. His most recent book, Chinese Sympathies: European Correspondences with East Asia from Jesuit Missionaries to Goethe’s World Literature, addresses the German reception of Chinese philosophy in the early modern period. Past publications include The Tyranny of Elegance: Consumer Cosmopolitanism in the Era of Goethe (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998); The Rise of Fashion (University of Minnesota Press, 2005); On the Ruins of Babel: Architectural Metaphor in German Thought (Cornell University Press, 2011); and the co-edited volume China in the German Enlightenment (University of Toronto Press, 2016).
Matthew Restall, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Colonial Latin American History, Anthropology, and Women’s Studies and Director of Latin American Studies, Penn State
Matthew Restall is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of History and Anthropology & Director of Latin American Studies at Penn State University. He was recently the Greenleaf Distinguished Professor at Tulane University and President of the American Society for Ethnohistory. He is a former National Endowment for the Humanities, John Carter Brown Library, Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, Library of Congress and US Capitol, and Guggenheim fellow. He edits Hispanic American Historical Review and book series with Cambridge and Penn State university presses. His two dozen books in six languages include The Maya World; Maya Conquistador; Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest; The Black Middle; 2012 and the End of the World; The Conquistadors; and When Montezuma Met Cortés, which won the 2020 Howard Cline Prize. His newest books are Return to Ixil (2019); Blue Moves (2020); and (with Penn State’s Amara Solari) The Maya (2020).
Amanda Scott, Assistant Professor of History, Penn State
Amanda L. Scott is an Assistant Professor of Early Modern European History at Penn State. Her first book, The Basque Seroras: Local Religion, Gender, and Power in Northern Iberia, 1550-1800, was published by Cornell University Press in March 2020. She has also published on clerical misbehavior, women and religion, and early modern Spanish legal culture in Renaissance Quarterly, The Sixteenth Century Journal, Church History, and in various edited collections. She serves on the board of directors of the Association of Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies and as a Councilor for the Sixteenth Century Society. Her next book project, entitled Pilgrim, Pastor, Pauper, Spy: The Case of Pierre de Praxelier, examines anxieties concerning foreigners and mobility along the Franco-Spanish border in the seventeenth century.
Amara Solari, Professor of Art History and Anthropology, Penn State
Amara Solari’s research focuses on processes of cultural, visual, and theological interchange between indigenous groups and Spanish settlers of New Spain. Her publications include Maya Ideologies of the Sacred: The Transfiguration of Space in Colonial Yucatan (2013), “The ‘Contagious Stench’ of Idolatry: The Rhetoric of Disease and Sacrilegious Acts in Colonial New Spain” in Hispanic American Historical Review, Idolizing Mary: Maya-Catholic Icons in Yucatán, Mexico, 1550–1700 (2019), and 2012 and the End of the World: The Western Roots of the Maya Apocalypse (2011; co-authored with Matthew Restall).
Marica Tacconi, Professor of Musicology and Art History, Associate Director of the School of Music, and Co-Director of the Committee for Early Modern Studies, Penn State
Marica Tacconi’s interdisciplinary research interests focus on the music, art, and culture of late medieval and early modern Italy. She is the author of the books I Libri del Duomo di Firenze (with Lorenzo Fabbri; 1997), and Cathedral and Civic Ritual in Late Medieval and Renaissance Florence: The Service Books of Santa Maria del Fiore (Cambridge University Press, 2005). Her research has been supported by several institutions and grant agencies, including the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Robert Lehman Foundation, the American Musicological Society, and Villa I Tatti – the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence.
Robin Thomas, Associate Professor of Art History and Architecture, Penn State
Robin Thomas specializes in the architecture and urbanism of Naples, with a particular focus on the social function of buildings in its early modern period. He has published on hospitals and poor houses, slavery and construction, and the economic understanding of architectural patronage.
Daniel Zolli, Assistant Professor of Art History, Penn State
Daniel Zolli is Assistant Professor of Art History at Penn State. A scholar whose interests span the art of medieval and early modern Italy, he is co-editor of three books: Sculpture in the Age of Donatello (D. Giles, 2015), The Art of Sculpture in Fifteenth-Century Italy (Cambridge U Press, 2020), and Contamination and Purity in Early Modern Art and Architecture (Amsterdam U Press, 2021). He is currently completing a monograph on Donatello’s workshops, and has begun research on a second book-length project on pigments and the Black Death.