Ali McKenna
I am an Architecture student at Texas A&M with two minors in Art and Architecture History and Philosophy. I am studying abroad in Florence for the Spring 26 semester and when I heard about Medici Archive Project I knew I had to be a part of it. It’s such a unique experience being able to participate in such an important part of history.
Bodhi Vandewalker
Bodhi Vandewalker is an aspiring designer and maker. A Minnesota native, his Midwestern roots laid the foundation for the joyful twists of the creative journey. He earned a bachelor’s degree in Graphic Design and User Experience from the University of Minnesota, approaching creativity as a way of living and a true means to connection. Bodhi’s work is guided by authenticity and the belief that passion matters most.
Bruno Schoech
Bruno Schoech is an Architecture major and Radiological Health Engineering minor at Texas A&M University. Bruno has had a long interest in the preservation of history, and while interning at the Medici Archive Project has been able to contribute to the preservation of Florence’s history. Fun fact about Bruno is that he has a background in researching and identifying American fungi. His favorite fungi is the “humongous fungus” in Oregon.
Giovanna Rudis
Giovanna Rudis is a recent graduate of Boston University, where she completed her BA in History with honors. Her research centers on early modern Europe, with a particular interest in the intersection of politics, art, and identity in the Medici court. She previously conducted independent research at the Archivio di Stato di Firenze for her senior thesis on Pope Leo X’s use of visual media in diplomacy and political self-fashioning. During her internship this summer, Giovanna hopes to deepen her skills in archival analysis, with a particular interest in Medici postal networks.
Leila Treherne
Leila Treherne is a second-year undergraduate studying Art History at the University of St Andrews. Born and raised in Italy between the Tuscan countryside and Rome, she developed a deep appreciation for cultural heritage from an early age. Her academic interests center on the intersection of art, literature, and history, with a strong emphasis on research and creative interpretation. Passionate about uncovering overlooked narratives, she uses writing as a way to engage with the past and bring new perspectives to light. In Florence, she will be working with Sheila Barker at the Center for Women in Renaissance Archives on the Digital Bronzini project and a research initiative focused on Artemisia Gentileschi.
Malte John
Malte John is a Bachelors’ student of history and art history at the University of Bonn. His main research interests lie with the social history of 15th century Florence, especially focussing on political networks and neighbourhood ties. For his BA thesis, he is researching the Ufficiali di notte and their role in the political struggle of the early 1430s.
Phoebe Ciocca
Phoebe Ciocca is a second year Classics undergraduate at the University of Cambridge (Pembroke College). She is working with MAP Fellow Davide Baldi Bellini on the reception and translation of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics across various cultures and languages. Her own research at MAP centres on Renaissance Italian translations and commentaries on Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
Phoebe Price
Phoebe Price recently graduated with a BA in Art History from Williams College. Her Honors Thesis examined the intersection of art and alchemy at the court of Francesco I de’ Medici, focusing on the relationship between pietra dura inlays and imitation stones. After attending the Paleography Seminar this winter, she is returning to MAP to work with Gaston Basile on the connections between material culture, science, and medicine in the early modern period. Her current research investigates how Medici patronage of the study and documentation of naturalia influenced court art, particularly in the creation of wedding festivities designed to showcase natural marvels and monstrosities.
Siri Moses
Siri Moses is a senior at Trinity School in New York City. She has experience in Classics and Art History, with over three years of studying Greek and six years of learning Latin. Throughout her high school career, Siri has led the Classics Club, the NYC Classics Conference, and Trinity’s premier Classics Magazine, and founded a volunteer organization to help teach young children Latin and Greek. Her work at MAP includes researching minorities in Florence during the Renaissance period.
Thomas McGrath
Thomas McGrath recently graduated with a BA in art history from Washington University in St. Louis. At MAP, he worked with Marcello Simonetta to explore city planning and diplomacy in 16th century Urbino.
Abby McDermott
Abby McDermott is a Bachelor’s student of Medieval History and Italian Studies at Smith College. After studying in Florence for the 23-24 academic year, she decided to continue her studies here for the summer. Her research interests lie in women’s health and medicine in Early Modern Italy.
Cosimo Hayward Evans
Cosimo Hayward Evans is a young man. He has an interest in the history of philosophy and science in early modern europe, with a specific focus Ferdinando II de’ Medici and the Accademia del Cimento. He is currently studying philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London.
Davis Priest
Davis Priest holds a B.A. from the University of Vermont in art history and Italian studies. She is spending the summer interning with the Medici Archive Project learning about manuscript, archival, and library studies. This summer Davis is working on a project involving the relationship of legal culture in the material world of the Florentine Renaissance. Her favorite museum in Florence is the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo and favorite church is Orsanmichele.
Iakoiehwahtha Patton
Iakoiehwahtha Patton is an art historian of the Northern Renaissance. At the University of Oxford, she recently completed her MSt of History of Art and Visual Culture, focusing on the gendering of death in the funerary arts of Renaissance France. Her dissertation, aptly titled “Gendering Death in the French Renaissance,” focused on the funerary patronage of Anne de Bretagne, twice Queen of France. Iako’s research addressed the political, cultural, and gendered matrix in which death was envisioned by considering Anne de Bretagne’s dual role as both a patron and a royal figure to be commemorated. Iako completed her undergrad at the University of Torono, studying Art History, Anthropology, and Renaissance Studies. In the fall, she will continue her postgraduate studies at Oxford, pursuing an MSc in Visual, Material, and Museum Anthropology.
Jillian Hauer
Jillian Hauer is a recent graduate of Arcadia University, where she earned a B.A. in Art History. Her thesis explored Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici’s strategic portrayal of Florence as a global hub through the collection, commission, and cultivation of objects related to the Americas. Jillian aims to deepen her research in this area through MAP and is excited about the opportunity to collaborate with various archives.
Kata Ispanovits
Kata Ispanovits is an undergraduate student of medieval history at the University of Pisa. She has been with the Medici Archive Project since 2023, continuing her research on the sociopolitical and economic consequences of the Pazzi conspiracy, with special attention to the effects on the women of the family, and the construction of image in Florence under Lorenzo de’ Medici.
Olivia Dick
Olivia Dick is a senior in high school at the International School of Florence. Originally from New York, she moved to Florence with her family in 2016 and has lived there since. She has worked as an intern with MAP since April 2023. Her interests lie in history, ecology, and evolutionary biology. At MAP, she’s particularly interested in the history of the perception of disabilities and Cosimo III.
Sofia Barbieri
Sofia Barbieri is an undergraduate honours student at the University of Toronto, where she studies History and Italian. Her interests revolve around the intersections of daily life, violence, and interpersonal relations in seventeenth-century Florence. Her current project seeks to examine social networks depicted in female-authored ricordanze, paying attention to women’s roles in their construction and destruction. At MAP, she is working with Maurizio Arfaioli on digitizing avvisi which reference military violence and its comprehensions.
Alessia Gagliardi
Alessia Gagliardi is a bachelor’s student of History of Art and Visual Culture and Comparative Literature and Culture at Royal Holloway University of London. Previous to her MAP Internship, she developed her knowledge of Fake News in the Avvisi written in Florentine Renaissance. In her upcoming dissertation, she will focus on how the Florentine society was mirrored by Art and Literature during the Renaissance. Her passion for Art History, that arose during her studies of Liceo Linguistico in Italy, led her to volunteer in the Picture Gallery of Royal Holloway, to allow people to visit it. This experience has set the basis for what she hopes will be her future career in this highly rewarding feel.
Chantal Maria Reissel
Chantal Maria Reissel earned her B.A. in European Studies (including Art History, Italian Studies, and Digital Humanities) in 2019 from the University of Passau and obtained her Master’s Degree in Art History at the University of Bonn in January 2023, with a thesis on the portraiture of the Florentine Renaissance artist Giuliano Bugiardini. During the course of her studies, she spent one semester each at Italian universities, namely the Università degli Studi di Perugia and the Università degli Studi di Roma ‘Tor Vergata’. From September 2021 to February 2022, she worked as a student assistant at the library of the Kunsthistorisches Institut (Max-Planck-Institut) in Florence. Currently, she is preparing a PhD project on the Florentine portraiture of the early Cinquecento, with a strong focus on questions of attribution and chronology.
Chiara Campagnaro
Chiara Campagnaro graduated from the University of Toronto in 2021 with a degree in History, Italian Studies, and Renaissance Studies. She is currently completing a Master’s in Art History, Curatorship, and Renaissance Culture at the Warburg Institute in London. Her research interests focus on early modern women, the history of the book trade, and Italian epics. Her master’s dissertation examines the collaborative nature of the printing press from the perspective of two Italian women printers in the sixteenth century, focusing on the intersection between work and gender. Chiara hopes to begin a meaningful career in education at a museum, gallery, or cultural heritage institution, combining her passion for teaching and history. She also hopes to pursue a PhD to continue her research on women in the book trade.
Elli Stogiannou
Elli holds a Bachelor of Art in Art History from Pomona College (2022) and she just recently finished her first year at Utrecht University’s master program in Ancient, Medieval, and Renaissance Studies. Her research interests lie in cross-cultural encounters and relations as they unfolded in the long seventeenth century in the Mediterranean basin. Elli, currently working on Greeks living in early modern Italian metropoles, hopes to work in the future on the intersection of women’s know-how, religion, and the urban setting.
Holly Johnstone
Holly Johnstone is a recent graduate from the University of Oxford where she completed her Master’s Degree in Early Modern History. Holly’s master’s thesis focused on the intersections of race-making, dress, and physical bodies in Cesare Vecellio’s 1598 costume book, De Gli Habiti Antichi et Moderni. She previously completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Toronto and hails from the Canadian Rockies.
Kaylee Kelley
Kaylee Kelley is a first-year PhD student at Boston University focusing on cinquecento portraiture and material culture. Her Master’s thesis entitled ‘“Illustrious Through Her Own Virtues”: An Alternative Vision of Laura in Cinquecento Florentine Portraiture’ investigated the relationship between devotional objects and portraiture vis-á-vis contemporary literature. Prior to her PhD, Kaylee completed a Master’s at The Institute of Fine Arts and a Bachelor’s at the University of St Andrews, where she earned a joint honours degree in the History of Art and English Literature. She was recently awarded a humanities grant by NYU, which will fund her internship at MAP.
My Lundborg
My Lundborg is a Library and Information Science Master’s student with a focus on digital libraries from Borås University in Sweden. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Cultural Studies from Gothenburg University, where she wrote her Bachelor’s thesis on the working conditions of municipally funded artists. Special interests include ideological history and the accessibility and preservation of cultural heritage. My came into contact with the Medici Archive Project while researching the digitization process of the Avviso Project earlier in 2023. She is currently researching the language and format used for communicating news and plans to continue the research in her master’s thesis next year.
Anna Malgeri
Anna Malgeri completed her BA and MA studies summa cum laude in history at the University of Florence in 2017 with a thesis on 18th-19th century Tuscany Jewry. She is a high school teacher and a poet. Her book of poems Abbracciami Israele was published in 2020. For more information about her see https://unifi.academia.edu/AnnaMalgeri .
Aubrey Peterson
Aubrey Peterson, 2nd year History Major at UC Santa Barbara, studying Renaissance and Baroque art and history.
Bethanie Belisle
Bethanie Belisle is a third-year student at the University of Minnesota-Morris. She is triple majoring in Art History, Political Science, and Medieval Studies. In addition, she is a McNair Scholar preparing to attend graduate school in Art History discipline. Her focus is on the political influence of the dismantling of art through the centuries, concentrating on the Classical to Medieval eras.
Daniela Graca
Daniela Graca holds a Bachelor of Music in musicology from the University of Ottawa (2022) and will begin her Master of Arts in musicology at McGill University this autumn. Her research centres around women in Italian Renaissance music with particular focus on music and the body and music in female homosocial settings. She was the 2022 recipient of the Anthony King Memorial Scholarship for her research about 16th-century musical feminism in the Florentine convent of La Crocetta and is currently a research assistant on Mapping the Musical Landscape of the 16th Century. Recently, Daniela was also awarded the SSHRC Canada Graduate Scholarship for her upcoming studies at McGill.
Erik Zielinski
My name is Erik Zielinski and I study medieval history at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. While my studies have broadly spanned over Europe, Africa, and Asia, I have always been fascinated by the Medici family and I am excited to have a chance to study them more closely.
Georgina Rowley
Georgina Rowley completed her undergraduate degree at the University of East Anglia, specialising in sixteenth-century Italian poetry. She wrote her third-year dissertation on the use of the Heroides as a mode of writing that offered courtesan-poets Veronica Franco and Tullia d’ Aragona a way of expressing their private aspirations publicly. Her interests include courtesans, women artists, matronage, and the studioli of Renaissance noblewomen. Georgina worked as a remote archive assistant with the Archives of the Jesuits in Britain for a year and then completed a six-week in-person placement. Over the last year, she has worked at the Norfolk Heritage Centre, cataloging ex-referenda and researching the collection of rare early modern books. Additionally, she gave a talk regarding her recent discovery of a medieval manuscript leaf. She will be beginning the MA in Art History, Renaissance Culture and Curatorship at the Warburg Institute in the autumn. Georgina will be working with Dr Sheila Barker at MAP to digitize Bronzini’s manuscripts at the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze and will search for archival material regarding the relationship between Leonora de’ Medici, Constanza Lenzi Gondi, and Lucrezia Quistelli.
Iran Danae Garza Torres
Danae Garza is a Bachelor student in Classics and Modern Languages at Royal Holloway University of London. This academic year she will be joining The Medici Archive Project where she will be serving as junior research fellow and intern’s coordinator for the Eugene Grant Jewish History Program
Sára Kovács
My name is Sára Kovács and I am a 3rd year undergraduate student at the Eötvös Loránd University of Budapest majoring in Italian Philology and minoring in Hungarian as a Foreign Language. Besides that, I am doing a double degree program which allows me to spend my final year at the University of Florence. My main interests are medieval literature and the Italian Renaissance, but I am also fond of languages too, whether ancient or modern ones.
Sophie Jones
Sophie Jones is a senior at Smith College, where she majors in art history with a concentration in archival studies and a minor in Italian. She is interning with MAP after spending the semester studying in Florence. Her focus lies within religious/devotional art and its ties to gender in the Renaissance period, and she is also interested in historical costume. She is a board member of Citrus, Smith’s fashion magazine.
Swetha Ganeshkumar
Swetha Ganeshkumar is a junior at the University of Minnesota majoring in Finance and minoring in Business Analytics at the Carlson School of Management. She is from Minnesota and is studying abroad in Florence for one semester. In her free time, she is involved with her business fraternity Delta Sigma Pi and an organization called THRIVE.
Wu Xiao
Wu Xiao is a Ph.D. student at École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris. Her dissertation focuses on the hospital architecture in Renaissance Italy. She completed her BA in ancient Chinese architecture at Peking University and published an article on the reconstruction of Grotto 55’s antechamber at Mogao, Dunhuang. Xiao has worked in several cultural institutions in Beijing, Xinjiang, and Fujian in China.
Zaida Lagunas
Zaida is a senior at the University of California, Santa Barbara pursuing a bachelor’s degree in History of Art & Architecture and a minor in Poverty, Inequality, and Social Justice. Previously, She interned with the Brooklyn Museum, and through The Association of Research Institutes in Art History, interned for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Canadian Center for Architecture, The Clark Art Institute, and the Yale Center for British Art. Currently, she is studying art and photography in Florence while also interning with the Medici Archive Project
Alison Holdsworth
Alison Holdsworth is currently pursuing a Master of Arts in Art History at American University in Washington, DC. She joined the Medici Archive Project in January of 2021, where she worked alongside a team of fellow graduate students for Dr. Gabriele Mancuso within the Eugene Grant Jewish History Program. Their tasks included collecting and cataloguing images and objects for an upcoming exhibition at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy. Most recently, Alison has also accepted a position to intern for Dr. Sheila Barker at MAP within the Jane Fortune Research Program on Women Artists. Alison’s own interests involve the work of women artists of the Italian Renaissance, material culture of the period, and somaesthetics. Her thesis focuses on Northern Italian portraits of women (1480-1600) and the evocation of the sense of touch to suggest female agency in those works. She had the wonderful opportunity to travel to Italy this summer for thesis research after being awarded the Carol Bird Ravenal Travel Award in Art History as well as a College of Arts and Sciences Student Research Award by faculty at American University.
Christine Staton
Christine Staton is a recent graduate of Syracuse University’s master’s program in Italian Renaissance art. Her program included a year-long residency in Florence where she first encountered the Medici Archive Project. Christine’s thesis, “The Nectanebo Lions on the Fontana dell’Acqua Felice: Egyptian Revival in the Rome of Sixtus V,” studied two Egyptian antiquities in Rome as a part of the Egyptian Revival during the Renaissance. She hopes to continue this work in a Ph.D. program. Christine has worked in several art museums and research institutions, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Medici Archive Project, and the Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento. Christine is a regular speaker and author for the Coalition of Master’s Scholars on Material Culture.
Katherine Rabogliatti
Katherine Rabogliatti is an Art History Masters student at Syracuse University. Her interests include women writers and artists in early modern Italy, with a particular focus on the life and work of Sofonisba Anguissola. She is currently researching Sofonisba’s time in Spain and later life, concentrating on the artist’s social circle at the Spanish court and how these relationships helped her gain international recognition. Katherine has been awarded the Chandler-Ott Fellowship from her undergraduate institution, Wellesley College, and the Florence Art History Fellowship from Syracuse University, both of which will fund her graduate studies.
Noah Dasinger
Noah Dasinger is currently a second-year master’s student at the University of Georgia, where he studies early Renaissance sculpture and the Medici. He joined the Medici Archive Project in June of 2021, where he worked alongside the director Dr. Alessio Assonitis. His duties included transcription, indexing, and cataloging documents uploaded onto MIA. His thesis entitled “Symbolic Epigraphy and the New Rome: Humanist Capitals on the Tomb of Leonardo Bruni” will address the connections between the revival of antique-styled Latin epigraphy and the growing influence of Romanesque manuscripts on the writings of Leonardo Bruni and the inscriptions Bernardo Rossellino. His work will shed light on the peculiarities of quattrocento epigraphy, addressing their semiclassical appearance, as opposed to their direction imitation of antique letterforms.
Olivia Marcum
Olivia Marcum is a senior at Centre College, double majoring in Art History and Studio Art with a concentration in oil painting. She has been awarded the J. Graham Brown Fellowship from Centre (her undergraduate institution). Her research interests include the activities and social contexts of early modern women in Europe, and the lives and works of early modern female painters. She is currently researching the studio practice of Artemisia Gentileschi in Florence. Next year, she will begin a year-long position as a research intern under Dr. Sheila Barker.