Our History of Art Team
The international History of Art Teaching Team offers a spectrum of expertise and individual approaches to teaching, while the department ‘house style’ of lecturing is informal, relaxed, engaging and participatory. Our courses are accessible to those coming to the subject with no previous background in Art History, but are at the same time pitched at a level that will engage all those who are already familiar with the subject.
Jeremy Boudreau (MA) joined the Senior Management Team of the Institute as Head of History of Art in 2014. His training is as a museum educator and art historian and his specialisation is the art and culture of Renaissance Italy. Today, he oversees a team of lecturers who contribute to the Institute’s history of art courses and study abroad programming. After graduating with a degree in Museum Education from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston, Jeremy completed his MA in Art History at Syracuse University as a Florence Fellow. He is an accredited Lecturer for The Arts Society, a member of the Association of Art Historians (AAH) and a member of the International Council of Museums (ICOM).
Academic publications: Boudreau, Jeremy. "Postcards from Castiglion Fiorentino: The Correspondence between Napoleone Aglietti and Stefano Bardni" in Lynn Catterson, ed., Florence, Berlin and beyond: late nineteenth-century art markets and their social networks. Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2020, 309-329.
Jason Arkles (MA) is an American sculptor working in the traditional methods and materials one would normally associate with a sculptor in Florence. His large-scale figurative work in bronze, marble, terracotta and wood can be found in public and private spaces, museums, cemeteries, and churches in Europe and America, including on the façade of Florence’s Saint Mark’s English Church. Trained in the studio of Charles H. Cecil and in a Pontifical Academy in Rome (sacred art), Jason runs a small teaching studio in Florence, in tandem with his professional career. Jason has also self-published two small books on sculpture; one being a manual for sculpting in clay using a living model, and the other, a translation and commentary on Leon Battista Alberti’s Della Statua. website
Academic publications: 'On Sculpture by Leon Battista Alberti'. Lulu.com, 2013; 'Sculpting from Life: A Studio Manual of the Sight-Size Method'. Lulu.com, 2007.
Kate Bolton-Porciatti (MPhil.) is a lecturer in Italian cultural history and music at the Istituto Lorenzo de'Medici in Florence, where she teaches BA and MA courses in the humanities. She did her M.Phil. thesis in the late 1980s on the musical culture of early 15th-century Florence, since when she has spent many years exploring the relationship between Italian art and music in the early modern period. She has published extensively as an academic and as a journalist for the BBC and the Daily Telegraph, UK. Before moving to Italy permanently in 2006, she was a senior producer for BBC Arts & Classical Music in London where she won Jerusalem and Sony Awards for her programmes.
Agata Anna Chrzanowska (PhD) graduated in Art History with a thesis concerning twentieth-century photography and in Italian Studies with a thesis on the linear perspective in Renaissance painting from University of Warsaw. She obtained her PhD in Italian Studies from Durham University with a thesis on the relationship between the narrative fresco cycles and religious spectacles in fifteenth-century Florence. She has published on the Tornabuoni Chapel in Santa Maria Novella and on the history of Polish photography. She collaborates with the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice and she works as licensed tour guide.
Academic publications: 'Who, then, is the «Nympha»? Iconographic Analysis of the Figure of the Maid in the Tornabuoni Frescoes', in The Figure of the Nymph in Early Modern Culture, ed. K. A.E. Enenkel, A. Traninger, Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2018; 'Ghirlandaio, Ficino and Hermes Trismegistus: Prisca Theologia in the Tornabuoni frescoes, Florence': “ISPF-LAB”, XIII, 2016.
Laura Fenelli (PhD) is originally from Parma and has been living and working as an art historian in Florence since 2007. She has an MA in Medieval History of Art and a Ph.D. in Medieval History. She works on history of medieval and early modern images and saints’ iconography and hagiography and she collaborates with the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence. Since 2009 she has been lecturing Art History in English for various colleges and universities.
Academic publications: 'Saints, Miracles and the Image: Healing Saints and Miraculous Images in the Renaissance', ed. S. Cardarelli, L. Fenelli, Brussels; Chicago: Brepols Publishers, 2017.;'Images and words in exile. Avignon and Italy in the first half of the fourteenth century (1310‐1352)', E. Brilli, L. Fenelli, G. Wolf (eds.), Firenze: Sismel‐Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2015; 'Il convento scomparso. Note per una ricostruzione del complesso fiorentino di S. Maria al Sepolcro (Le Campora)', in “Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz”, 55, 2, 2013; Dall’eremo alla stalla. Sant’Antonio abate tra testi e immagini. Roma; Bari: Laterza, 2011.
Lisa Kaborycha (PhD) has a BA in Comparative Literature, an MA in Italian Studies, and a PhD in Medieval and Early Modern European History from the University of California, Berkeley. Her area of specialty is the cultural and social history of Renaissance Florence, having extensively researched fifteenth-century Florentine manuscript anthologies known as zibaldoni. She has been the recipient of Fulbright and National Endowment for the Humanities awards, and Harvard’s Villa I Tatti Fellowship. The author of A Short History of Renaissance Italy (Pearson 2010) and A Corresponding Renaissance: Letters Written by Italian Women 1375-1650 (Oxford 2016), Lisa also teaches at study abroad programmes of various American universities in Tuscany, is an accredited Arts Society Lecturer, as well as a Senior Research Fellow at the Medici Archive Project.
Academic publications: 'A Corresponding Renaissance: Letters Written by Italian Women, 1375-1650'. New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016; “Brigida Baldinotti and Her Two Epistles in Quattrocento Florentine Manuscripts” in Speculum 87.3 (July 2012), 793-826; 'A Short History of Renaissance Italy'. Edition no. 1. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2011. 945.06 KAB;
Caterina Romei (MA) graduated in Art History from the University of Florence with a thesis on the ‘Counter-Reformation in the church of SS. Annunziata’ and received her ‘laurea specialistica’ in Museology with a thesis on ‘Visitors to the Uffizi Gallery at the end of the 18th century’. Caterina is a professional guide and has taught for many years on study abroad programs for American and International universities, among them Emily Carr School of art and Design, Vancouver, Canada and the New York State Teacher association. At the moment she is the head teacher in the art history department of the Bachelor Interior Design and Graphic program of the University of Chester in Florence.
Academic publication:”Visitatori e copisti agli Uffizi a fine Settecento. Analisi del gusto artistico attraverso i permessi di copia”, in “Scritti di Museologia e storia del collezionismo in onore di Cristina De Benedictis. a cura di Donatella Pegazzano”, Firenze 2012