Elizabeth Kassler-Taub

Professor Kassler-Taub is a historian of early modern art, architecture, and urbanism with a focus on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy in its global context. Her teaching offers a range of perspectives on the period, featuring topics such as the transcultural exchange of architectural and artistic knowledge in the Mediterranean, the rise of the viral printed image, and the invention of the urban utopia. Her scholarship explores the architectural and urban footprint of Spanish colonialism in southern Italy and the Americas; the theory and historiography of early modern globalism; and the intersection of architecture, public monuments, and collective memory. Kassler-Taub's monograph, Architecture and Urbanism in Early Modern Palermo: Building an Elastic City (in press with Cambridge University Press, expected fall 2026), explores the development of the Sicilian capital during the first centuries of Spanish viceregal rule. She is also the co-editor of the volume, Monumentality: Histories and Ideologies (in press with Getty Research Institute Publications, expected fall 2026). A collaboration with Inderbir Singh Riar (Carleton University), the volume considers architectural monumentality from a global and transhistorical perspective, drawing on contributions from over 20 international scholars and curators. Her previous publications, spanning subjects from the racialized history of Renaissance style to the urban "waterscape," have appeared in journals and edited volumes such as the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Convivium, Modern Philology, and Word & Image. In 2023, Kassler-Taub was a Member of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. Her work was previously supported by a Sawyer Seminar at Penn State funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (2021), a Jane L. Keddy Memorial Fellowship from the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University (2021), a RSA-Samuel H. Kress Research Fellowship in Renaissance Art History from the Renaissance Society of America (2021), and a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Getty Research Institute (2018-19). At Dartmouth, she is a founding member of the Early Modern Incubator, an interdisciplinary collaborative sponsored by the Leslie Center for the Humanities.