Center for Renaissance Studies

Lia Markey (Ph.D., University of Chicago) is the Director of the Center for Renaissance Studies. Her publications include a monograph, Imagining the Americas in Medici Florence (2016), and two edited volumes, The New World in Early Modern Italy, 1492-1750 (2017) with Liz Horodowich, and Renaissance Invention: Stradanus’s “Nova Reperta” (2020). She teaches at the University of Chicago and Northwestern University and has held fellowships at the Folger Library, the Warburg Institute, the Villa I Tatti, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Herzog August Bibliothek. Lia participates in the Getty Connecting Art Histories Research Group, “Spanish Italy and the Iberian New World.” Along with Rebecca Fall, Christopher Fletcher, and Noémie Ndiaye, she co-curated the Newberry exhibition Seeing Race before Race (fall 2023) and co-edited with Ndiaye the related publication by the same name.

Christopher D. Fletcher is the Assistant Director of the Center for Renaissance Studies. He earned his PhD in Medieval History from the University of Chicago in 2015. His research and teaching focus primarily on religion and public engagement before 1800. He has written articles and book chapters and co-edited volumes on various forms of public outreach in medieval and early modern Europe and the digital humanities, and his current book project, Public Engagement in the Middle Ages: Medieval Approaches to a Modern Crisis, uses medieval practices of public engagement to prepare medievalists to more effectively reach diverse audiences today. He is a co-curator of the Seeing Race Before Race exhibition (on view Fall 2023), and often shares the Newberry’s pre-1800 collections with the public through in-person collection presentations, exhibitions, social media, and digital resources.

Dylan Bingham is the Program Manager for the Center for Renaissance Studies. She received a Bachelor's degree in Art History, with a concentration in Italian Renaissance Art, from Hollins University in 2015. Her work focuses on women in portraiture, with a focus on depictions of motherhood and socioeconomic status. Dylan will be pursuing her Master's in History at DePaul University beginning Fall 2024.

Yasmine Hachimi (Ph.D., University of California at Davis) is a Public Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Renaissance Studies. Her book project, Tudorotica, traces the eroticization of Tudor queens across centuries and genres, from 16th-century letters and plays, to TV shows and fanfiction today. Yasmine is interested in how popular media and images of the premodern period challenge or affirm public understandings of the past, particularly with regards to sexuality and race. She has shared her work and expertise in several venues, including talks, academic and public-facing publications, podcasts, and social media outlets. Yasmine is co-curator of the Seeing Race Before Race exhibition (Fall 2023) and she is currently exploring the affordances and limitations of color-conscious casting in period dramas.