Elizabeth A. Kassler-Taub

Professor Kassler-Taub is a specialist in early modern art, architecture, and urbanism, with a focus on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy. Her teaching and research interests include: the transcultural exchange of artistic and architectural knowledge in the Mediterranean; Spanish colonialism and urban intervention in southern Italy and the Americas; and the theory and historiography of early modern globalism. Professor Kassler-Taub’s current book project, Elastic Empire: Architecture, Urbanism, and Identity in Early Modern Palermo, explores the architectural and urban development of early modern Palermo during the first centuries of Spanish viceregal rule. Her work has been recently supported by the Getty Research Institute, the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University, and the Renaissance Society of America. In fall 2021, she will be a Visiting Scholar in the Sawyer Seminar “Transmission, Containment, Transformation: A Comparative Approach to Architecture and Contagion in Early Modern Cities” at Penn State, sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.