Dr. Sheila Barker
Educational Programming Director
Ph.D. Columbia University, 2002
Research Interests:
Interrelationships between art and medicine; Women artists and patrons; 17th-century Rome
email:
barker[at]medici[dot]org
Location:
Italy Dr. Sheila Barker graduated from Amherst College in 1993 and completed her M.A., M.Phil., and Ph. D. at Columbia University with a specialization in Italian Baroque painting. She has extensive teaching experience (Barnard College, The College of St. Rose, and The American University of Rome); she has managed a private Old Master art gallery; and she has worked in the curatorial department of the Indianapolis Museum of Art as the Allen Whitehill Clowes Curatorial Fellow. She was a Post-doctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in 2005, and she was a Samuel H. Kress Fellow at The Medici Archive Project from 2005-2007 and a Medici Archive Project Fellow in 2007-2008.
Her publications have investigated the impact of plagues upon art and society in Baroque Rome; the evolution of Saint Sebastian's cult and iconography; theories of disease in relation to the art of Nicholas Poussin; the historical reception of Pope Urban VIII; the documentation on women artists in the Uffizi Historical Archives; and the early history of the antimalarial drug quinine. Her forthcoming book on the career of Gian Lorenzo Bernini views the artist exclusively through the lens of contemporary journalistic reports that she found in the Medici Granducal Archive.
