Notes on Contributors
Katie Jakobiec
is an art and architectural historian with research interests that lie broadly in interdisciplinary approaches to the built environment of the early modern period. Currently she is preparing for publication her first book, The Architecture of Commodities, which explores the buildings and sites that facilitated the exchange of goods in the Baltic Sea region. Before her fellowship at I Tatti, Katie was the Scott Opler Junior Research Fellow in Architectural History at Worcester College, University of Oxford. She has taught art and architectural history at the University of Edinburgh and the University of Toronto.
Kristi Cheramie
is Professor and Head of Landscape Architecture at the Knowlton School, The Ohio State University. Her research explores the many ways we use building to respond to and cope with environmental fluctuation. In particular, she is interested in efforts aimed at mitigating or eliminating change. To track patterns of adaptability and transformation in the landscape, she moves between fieldwork, ethnography, archival research, and data visualization. Her first book, Through Time and the City: Notes on Rome, uses a combination of text and data-rich mappings to examine the systems, scales, and cycles that contribute to the making and unmaking of the city.
Robert Clines (he/him)
is Associate Professor of History and International Studies at Western Carolina University. He is a literary historian of race, religion, and cross-cultural encounters in premodern Italy; in particular, his research explores the place of racecraft in the construction of Italians’ senses of the past, themselves, and others. His first book, A Jewish Jesuit in the Eastern Mediterranean, was published in 2019. His essays and public pieces have appeared in numerous venues, such as postmedieval, Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome, and The Washington Post. He’s received research support from the Bogliasco Foundation, the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, the American Academy in Rome, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the US-Italy Fulbright Commission. He is currently completing a book on race and empire in Italian humanism.
Caroline E. Murphy
is an Assistant Professor in the History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture and Art section of the Department of Architecture at MIT. Her research and teaching explore the interconnected material and intellectual histories of environmental engineering, state administration, and political economy in early modern Europe and its global contact zones. Her present scholarship, which focuses on alluvial design and planning in Italy on the eve of the Little Ice Age, examines how the peninsula’s consolidating principalities worked to transform landscapes of unruly rivers into viable communication infrastructures, both to mitigate flood disasters and partake of the fruits of early globalization. Caroline’s work has been supported by fellowships from MIT, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts, the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. She has taught at Villanova University, and holds a PhD in History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture and Art from MIT.
Mahroo Moosavi
Mahroo Moosavi is Nizami Ganjavi Centre Fellow at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Oxford. She is an historian of early modern Iran, specialised in the intersections of architecture/art and literature of the 16th and 17th centuries Iran and the broader Persianate world. She is particularly interested in the psychic-thematic and architectonic connotations and micro-polities of the textually inscribed objects and written artefacts, such as the manuscripts, and the epigraphic programme of public buildings of the major Safavid cities like Isfahan. Her research is also concerned with new readings of the architecture and arts of Islam and Iran through blurring the boundaries between the visual and textual cultures. From 2021 to 2023, she has held post-doctoral fellowships and visiting lectureships at the University of Oxford, including the Bahari Fellowship in the Persian Arts of the Book at the Bodleian Libraries, Oliver Smithies Lectureship at Balliol College, and the Nizami Ganjavi Centre Fellowship at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies. Her research has been supported by the British Academy, the British Institute of Persian Studies, University of Oxford, the Warburg Institute, School of Advanced Study, University of London amongst others.
Aleksandr Bierig
is an Assistant Professor in the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto. He studies eighteenth- and nineteenth-century urban and architectural history, with a focus on interactions between the built environment, the natural environment, and political economy in Britain and its empire. He is currently working on a book that examines the architecture, infrastructure, and culture of coal use in Britain between 1700 and 1849.
Christy Anderson
is Professor of Renaissance and Baroque Architecture at the University of Toronto. Her interests in architecture include both the close study of buildings in their physical and cultural settings as well as the more theoretical interpretation of architectural experience and design methods. She is currently working on the meanings of materials in European architecture and a related project on the varieties of architectural experience in the early modern era. She has published on architectural photography, British and Italian buildings, and the history of the architectural treatise. Future projects include the history of Scandinavian buildings and architecture in the global Renaissance.
William Taylor
is Emeritus Professor of Architecture at the University of Western Australia, School of Design. Taylor is responsible for numerous published research outcomes, including solely- and co-authored books, edited books and special journal issues, as well as many refereed journal articles and published conference papers, catalogue essays and critical reviews. He researches and writes on wide-ranging subjects including history and theories of the built environment (interdisciplinary and humanities research); buildings in social and political contexts; philosophy and architecture; catastrophe and disaster studies; and his back-burner project: architecture, ships and the sea. He and his collaborators have written for Ashgate, Routledge and Bloomsbury, among other top-shelf publishers.