Jacob Eisensmith

Jacob Eisensmith specializes in the visual culture of early modern Italy and its Mediterranean surrounds, focusing on the role of art in forming and asserting cultural identity in regions historically viewed as peripheral. His research and teaching looks at the intercultural networks formed between sites of political power, like Venice, Naples, and Constantinople, and how they use art as soft power to assert control over their contested peripheries. Ranging from 1400 to 1600, his work seeks to bring sites historically understudied, like Southern Italy and the Balkan Peninsula, into ongoing conversations on the political stakes of artistic style, and the use of art to control populations in imperial and pseudo-colonial settings. Having recently finished his PhD at the University of Pittsburgh, entitled Anxieties and Influences: Italian Cultural Entanglements with ethnic Ottoman Empire, 1400-1600, he is currently working on articles focused on Venetian art and consumption in the Bay of Kotor, and the role of Ottoman encroachment in reshaping the artistic preferences of Southern Italy. His work has been supported by the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, the 

Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the Kunsthistorisches Institute in Florence, and The Center for the Art and Architectural History of Port Cities at La Capraia, Naples. In addition to offering courses on Italian art, he teaches more broadly about transcultural exchange in an early modern global context.

Course Offerings include:

·      The Arts of Empire: European Global Empires of the Early Modern World

·      Italian Renaissance Art

·      Southern Italian Art: Gothic to Global