Jennifer Nelson

Biography

Jennifer Nelson works on the art and cultural production of early modern Europe and its outposts. They teach survey courses of the Renaissance period in northern and southern Europe as well as courses on early modern art and science, questions of ekphrasis and writing about images, transimperial rhetorics, and conspiracy theories prior to the last hundred years.

Their current book project, “Art and the Other: The Ends of Early World Christendom,” examines cultural production in Southeast Asia, New Spain, Southeast Europe and the eastern Mediterranean, and the Netherlands in the second half of the sixteenth-century. This comparative project develops a heuristic, despite many internecine conflicts, for the common affective operations of European-sponsored visual culture at these border sites (both territorial and conceptual). These operations contrast with—perhaps even misappropriate—an eme​​rging discourse that begins at the very same time to define art itself among educated Europeans. Research for this book, under contract with Penn State University Press, has received support from the Harvard Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study, a Nationa​l Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute at the Newberry Library, the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the Clark Art Institute.

Nelson is also the author most recently of the biography Lucas Cranach: From German Myth to Reformation (Reaktion Press, 2024), which delivers a new account of a Renaissance master artist as a visual anchor and co-developer of emergent German and Luther​an communities. Nelson’s first book, Disharmony of the Spheres: The Europe of Holbein’s Ambassadors​ (Penn State, 2019), won the 2021 Historians of British Art Prize for a book on a subject before 1600. It describe​​s how some elite Europeans in the first half of the sixteenth century, confronted with irreconcilable difference in the forms of encroaching Ottomans and Christian confessional schism, celebrated that difference in the realms of theology, scientific instrument design, humanist scholarship, and, of course, painting.

The author of four books of poetry, including the forthcoming On the Way to the Paintings of Forest Robberies (winner of the 2024 Ottoline Prize from Fence), Nelson received their MFA in Poetry from New York University, in the middle of completing their PhD in History of Art from Yale University. They also have an MA in History of Art and Visual Culture from the Courtauld Institute of Art and ​an AB in Literature with a Citation in Ancient Greek from Harvard College.​ ​