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 and research explore the transcultural exchange of artistic and architectural knowledge in the Mediterranean, Spanish colonialism in southern Italy and the Americas, and the theory and historiography of early modern globalism. Her publications span subjects from the racialized history of Renaissance style to the urban "waterscape." Kassler-Taub's current book project, Elastic City: Architecture and Urbanism in Early Modern Palermo, explores the development of the Sicilian capital during the first centuries of Spanish viceregal rule. Her forthcoming volume, Monumentality: Histories and Ideologies (Getty Research Institute Publications, Issues & Debates Series), co-edited with Inderbir Singh Riar (Carleton University), explores architectural monumentality from a global and transhistorical perspective. 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 recently 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).