Interdisciplinary studies on Italian history and culture in Italy and beyond, c. 1400-1800
Leah Clark
Associate Professor, History of Art
My research explores the exchange and mobility of art objects in the fifteenth century. I am interested in the intersections between collecting, diplomacy, and trade in the Italian courts (Ferrara and Naples in particular). My current interests around the global collection of objects have led me to expand outwards from Italy to consider exchanges with the Mamluk and Ottoman courts and also consider the sensorial conditions of transcultural objects.
My first monograph, Collecting Art in the Italian Renaissance Court: Objects and Exchanges (Cambridge University Press, 2018) explored the mobility of collectibles across Italian courts at the end of the fifteenth century. My second monograph, Courtly Mediators: Transcultural Objects Between Renaissance Italy and the Islamic World (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2023) investigates the exchange of objects—ceramics, metalwork, and aromatics—between Italian courts and the Mamluk and Ottoman courts. I am also co-editor with Kathleen Christian of the textbook, European Art and the Wider World 1350-1550 (Manchester University Press, 2017).
I direct the History of Art programme for the Department for Continuing Education, University of Oxford. I co-organise with Helen Coffey (Music, the Open University) an interdisciplinary annual conference on Early Modern Sensory Experiences (EMSE) at Kellogg College annually.