My research focuses is on how art, cartography and landscape design shaped and reflected the ways in which humans in early modern Europe imagined, navigated and engineered their relationships with the natural world.
Current Research
I am currently working on the Accademia degil Arcadi and investigating how they expressed their relationship with nature through garden design, text, and performance. Two in-press chapters should be published in 2024, for previous research on this see below.
I am also working on a project that is using digital methods to understand lost landscapes. The ain focus of this is the Digital Cartographies of the Roman Campagna project, see more about that here.
Publications
Landscape and the Arts in Early Modern Italy: Theatre, Gardens and Visual Culture, Amsterdam University Press, 2022.
‘The Princely Landscape as Stage: Early Modern Courts in Enchanted Gardens, Landscape and Authority in the Early Modern World, edited by Stephen Whiteman, Pennsylvania University Press, 2023.
‘The Bosco Parrasio as a site of pleasure and sadness’, in Histoire Culturelle de l’Europe, Special Issue: Jardin et mélancolie en Europe entre le XVIe siècle et l’époque contemporaine, 2018.
‘Digital Cartographies of the Roman Campagna’, with Lisa Beaven and Mitchell Whitelaw, in The Routledge Research Companion to Digital Medieval Literature, Jennifer E. Boyle and Helen J. Burgess (eds), Routledge, 2017.
‘Planting ‘Italian Gusto’ in ‘a Gothick country’: The influence of Filippo Juvarra on William Kent’, in David Marshall, Susan Russell and Karin Wolfe (eds), Roma Britannica: Art Patronage and Cultural Exchange in Eighteenth-Century Rome, British School at Rome: London, 2011.
‘The Garden Theatre in Lucca’, Art Site and Spectacle, Studies in Early Modern Visual Culture (Melbourne Art Journal, vols 9-10), 2007.
‘Gardens in Lucca’, Place, an interdisciplinary e-journal, vol. 1, March 2007.