Pamela A.V. Stewart
Assistant Professor
Art History
236 - Ford
Education
PhD, The University of MichiganBiography
Pamela Stewart specializes in the visual culture of the Italian Renaissance and Baroque, with a focus on the intersections of art, ritual, and devotion in sixteenth-century Milan. She is more broadly interested in art and the Catholic Reformation; the materiality of the sacred; early modern art theory; spectacle, ephemera, and performance studies; the production of place; the history of the body; modes of viewership; and somaesthetics and the senses. She received her PhD from the University of Michigan and a BA (magna cum laude) from the University of Pennsylvania.
Dr. Stewart has presented her work at national and international conferences and published articles on ritual viewing and imagination. Her current book project, Imagining Christ, Performing the Passion: Art and Devotion in Early Modern Milan, 1500-1630, explores the use of images, monuments, and installations by religious confraternities to forge affective bonds to Christ’s suffering body and activate the spaces of devotion—chapels, oratories, and the city streets—to fashion a dynamic sacred topography in late Renaissance Milan. Other projects include Place/Performance/Identity, a volume of essays co-edited with Leslie Atzmon.
Gallery
News
“Hoc maiorum religioso exemplo”: The Medieval Origins of Milan’s Stational Crosses.” Paper to be presented at the annual meeting of the International Medieval Congress, Kalamazoo, MI, May 2020.
“Reinventing the Cross in Early Modern Milan: Memory, Ritual, and the City as Palimpsest.” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Association for Italian Studies, Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, NC, March 2019.
“Performing the Passion in the Ritual City: Stational Crosses and Confraternal Spectacle in Late Renaissance Milan,” in Space, Place, & Motion: Locating Confraternities in the Late Medieval and Early Modern City, ed. Diana Bullen Presciutti. Leiden: Brill, 2017: 217-243
“Lapidary Metaphors and Tangible Presence in Titian’s Crowning with Thorns.” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America, Boston, MA, April 2016
“Ritual Viewing in the Chapel of Corpus Christi: Bernardino Luini's Passion Cycle for the Church of San Giorgio al Palazzo, Milan” in The Sacralization of Space and Behavior in the Early Modern World, ed. Jennifer M. DeSilva. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2015: 101-140