Professor Genevieve Warwick
Sabbatical Fellow, July - December 2025
Genevieve Warwick is a specialist in Renaissance and Early Modern visual culture. She began her teaching career at the Courtauld Institute, then serving as Faculty and College Director of Research and Graduate Studies for Arts & Humanities. From 2012-17 she was Editor and Chair of Art History, the leading UK journal for the discipline. She was previously a Visiting Research Fellow at IASH in 2008.
In her field, Genevieve is author of 13 books including 5 monographs, exhibition catalogues, journal special issues, anthologies, and some 50 articles. From 2017-21, she was Major Research Fellow of the Leverhulme Trust to write The Mirror of Art: Painting and Reflection in Early Modern Visual Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2024). In Spring 2022 she was Guest Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center Munich to begin new research on early modern landscape imagery and the Anthropocene, subsequently furthered through a Visiting Professorship at the Harvard Center for Renaissance Studies Florence in Spring 2025. Genevieve will continue her research on historical landscapes and environmental history during her Fellowship at IASH.
Project title: The Early Modern Landscape View
My research redresses analyses of the Renaissance rise of landscape painting in Europe through the prism of environmental studies. Connecting art-historical literatures on landscape imagery with environmental histories of the land itself, it rewrites our understanding of this new genre of art’s emergence within a history of the Anthropocene. The geographical scope of the research is global, centred on landscape histories and their perception in art set within larger narratives of early modernity. Through visual representations, the research charts vast shifts in early modern land uses with resulting observations of climate change, alongside encounters with entirely new landscapes of global exploration circa 1492. Coupled with an emerging early modern scientific depiction of nature, the research considers artistic and literary manifestations of nostalgia for lost arcadian landscapes that suffused painting, pastoral music, and poetry of the period. It is thus concerned with longue durée pastoral and agrarian histories from the late Middle Ages into Early Modernity; as well as the impact of circumnavigation and ‘new world’ exploration on land imaginaries in word and image.