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Professor Evelyn Welch, BA (Harvard) PhD (London)
Professor of Renaissance Studies and Vice-Principal for Research and International Affairs

email: e.welch@qmul.ac.uk

Evelyn Welch is an art historian with a special interest in European visual and material culture between 1300 and 1800. She is the author of Art and Authority in Renaissance Milan (Yale, 1995), Art in Renaissance Italy, 1350-1500 (OUP, 2000), and Shopping in the Renaissance: Consumer Cultures in Italy 1400-1600 (Yale, 2005) which was awarded the Wolfson Prize for History. She is co-author (with Dr James Shaw) of Making and Marketing Medicine in Renaissance Florence (Rodopi, 2011); and co-editor of The Material Renaissance (Manchester University Press, 2007), the result of a three-year Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and Getty Foundation funded project on Italian Renaissance consumption. Her current work focuses on early modern dress and material culture. Professor Welch is currently leading a 5.5 million pound AHRC strategic programme: Beyond Text: Performances, Sounds, Images,Objects. In 2012, she will take on the Directorship of the 4 million pound AHRC Knowledge Exchange Hub: Creativeworks London which will support research into London's Creative Economy and develop relationships between Arts and Humanities researchers and business.

In 2010 she was awarded a HERA grant to investigate early modern fashion in conjunction with the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Universities of Stockholm, Copenhagen, and Helsinki. The three-year research project is entitled Fashioning the Early Modern: Creativity and Innovation in Europe, 1500-1800. Professor Welch is currently supervising graduate students (including two AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award holders) working on topics ranging from Renaissance court culture to early modern English underwear.   

Professor Welch is the College's Vice-Principal for Research and International Affairs and was awarded a National Teaching Fellowship in 2006. She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Royal Society of Arts.

Research interests:

• Italian Renaissance art and culture
• Renaissance and Early Modern dress
• Early Modern material culture

Publications:

Books

Art in Renaissance Italy, Oxford University Press, 2000.

Selected articles and book chapters:

‘Perfumed Buttons and Scented Gloves: Smelling Things in Renaissance Italy’, Ornamentalism: Accessories in the Renaissance, ed. B. Mirabella, forthcoming, University of Michegan Press.

'Public Magnificence and Private Display: Giovanni Pontano’s De Splendore (1498) and the Domestic Arts’, Journal of Design History, 15 (2002), 211-27.

'The Art of Expenditure. The Court of Paola Malatesta Gonzaga in Fifteenth-century Mantua', Renaissance Studies, 16 (2002), 306-17.

'From Retail to Resale: The Second-Hand Market in Renaissance Italy, 1400-1600' , in The Art Market in Italy, 15th -17th centuries, eds M. Fantoni, L. Matthew and S. Matthews Grieco, Olschki, Florence, 2002, 283-300.

‘New, old and second-hand culture. The Case of the Renaissance sleeve’, Value in Renaissance Art, eds G. Neher and R. Shepherd, Ashgate Press, Aldershot, 2000, 101-20.