Ana’s work is broadly interested in European practices of making and the affective valences of material culture, as well as the human implications of material consumption. Her current research investigates the relationships between elite women, global fashion cultures, and portraiture in seventeenth-century Genoa, with a focus on the oeuvres of Flemish painters Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony van Dyck. Situating Genoa’s fashion system within a global framework, her research explores the sartorial vocabulary used by women, their relationship with a materialized world, and the dynamics of these interactions as they manifest in elite portraiture. Her work stitches together the material and sensory qualities of artistic production with a deep investment in embodied entanglements with objects at the level of gender relations, and in regard to the human cost of colonialism and imperialism.
Originally from New Zealand, Ana completed her bachelor’s degree in the History of Art and French at the University of Auckland. After a year abroad at the Université Paris-Sorbonne, she earned her MA in the History of Art at the Courtauld Institute in London, specializing in early modern Netherlandish artistic production. She is currently finishing her PhD at the University of Cambridge. From April 2022 she has undertaken a fellowship at the British School in Rome. She will be continuing this fieldwork in spring 2023 and will be visiting various archives and collections pertaining to her research in Genoa and Rome. Her research has been generously funded by the Prince of Wales International Scholarship (The Cambridge Trust), the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), the Royal Historical Society, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the British School in Rome, and the Society for Renaissance Studies.
Ana’s appointment as assistant professor in Cornell’s Department of History of Art begins July 2023, and she notes, “I am very much looking forward to teaching my advanced seminar Art of Dress: Fashioning Identities in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1789. Sharing with my students the ways in which dress and art histories can be brought into conversation will be incredibly exciting!”
