Biography
Lia Markey (MA University of Chicago 2002; PhD University of Chicago 2008) is the Director of the Center for Renaissance Studies at Chicago’s Newberry Library where she is responsible for conferences, symposia, workshops, seminars and digital humanities projects devoted to premodern studies. Presently, she is also co-curating an exhibition on Stradanus’s famed Nova Reperta print series (April 2020), that explores invention and technology in the early modern period.
Dr. Markey’s research examines cross-cultural exchange between Italy and the Americas in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, collecting history, and early modern prints and drawings. Most recently, she has published Imagining the Americas in Medici Florence (Penn State University Press, 2016) and a co-edited volume The New World in Early Modern Italy, 1492-1750 (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Her edited volume, Renaissance Invention: Stradanus’s “Nova Reperta” (Northwestern University Press, forthcoming 2020), will complement the Newberry Library’s spring 2020 exhibition by the same title and include catalogue entries as well as contributions from a related Newberry symposium.
Dr. Markey has taught at Northwestern University, the University of Pennsylvania and at Princeton University and held fellowships at the Folger Library, the Warburg Institute, Harvard's Villa I Tatti, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Herzog August Bibliothek. She currently participates in the Getty Connecting Art Histories Research Group, “Spanish Italy and the Iberian New World.”
