Teddy Chappell

Teddy Chappell is a second-year PhD student in History at the University of Pennsylvania, where he came after completing his BA at the University of Minnesota. His research focuses on the intersection of intellectual life, artistic production, and material culture in seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Tuscany. During his fellowship this summer in Florence, he will explore how Tuscan figures like Francesco Redi, Lorenzo Magalotti, and Bartolomeo Bimbi, along with their Medici patrons, worked to establish Tuscan material goods such as wine and telescope lenses as cultural symbols of the Grand Duchy. He is particularly interested in how these intellectual and artistic efforts dovetailed with Grand Ducal policies that sought to promote and protect artisanal and agricultural production, such as Cosimo III’s 1717 edicts demarcating the boundaries within which authentic Chianti could be produced.