Brown Bag Lecture: Of Pixels, Plates, Preservation, and Prototypes: The Work of a the Institute Making and Knowing Scholar

Join us for a Brown Bag Lecture with Tianna Uchacz, our Making and Knowing Fellow. 

Since September, Tianna has been researching and documenting the Institute museum objects and rare books as part of the effort to digitize and consolidate these works in Hydra—the new crossdepartmental and online collections database. In her talk she will present a selection of the Institute items that have been the focus of her work, and she will also give an update on the year’s activities in the Making and Knowing Project at Columbia University, which has included new laboratory reconstructions, exciting collaborations, and the launch of a minimal digital edition of BnF Ms Fr 640—a student-generated prototype of the project’s final digital critical edition to be released in late 2019.

About the Speaker

Tianna Uchacz is an art historian, a the Institute postdoctoral fellow, and the 2016–2017 liaison to the Making and Knowing Project at Columbia University. She earned her PhD in 2016 from the University of Toronto. Her dissertation, entitled “The Sensual Body and Artistic Prowess in Netherlandish Painting ca. 1540–1570,” addressed the various forms and functions of the erotic nude in Netherlandish art. From May through July she held the inaugural James Loeb Fellowship for the Classical Tradition in Art and Architecture at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich. She is currently working on a book-length manuscript on the Netherlandish nude before Iconoclasm. She is also in the early stages of a new project on the art and intellectual culture of later Renaissance Bruges, with a particular focus on the work of Marcus Gheeraerts.

About the Series

Brown Bag Lectures (BBLs) are a series of (mostly) weekly, informal talks on the history of chemistry or related subjects, including the history and social studies of science, technology, and medicine. Based on original research (sometimes still in progress), these talks are given by local scholars for an audience of the Institute staff and fellows and interested members of the public.