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. She is also at work on a co-edited volume of scholarly essays and curatorial reflections with Inderbir Singh Riar (Azrieli School of Architecture & Urbanism, Carleton University) on architectural monumentality from a global and transhistorical perspective. Her work has been recently supported by a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Getty Research Institute, a Jane L. Keddy Memorial Fellowship from the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University, and a RSA-Samuel H. Kress Research Fellowship in Renaissance Art History from 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 (https://sites.psu.edu/earlymoderncities).