Key Interests

• Renaissance and early modern visual and material culture
  
• Medical Humanities
• Dress and Fashion

Biography

Professor Welch graduated from Harvard University with a BA in Renaissance History and Literature (Magna cum Laude) and received her PhD from the Warburg Institute, University of London. She has taught at the Universities of Essex, Birkbeck, Sussex and Queen Mary, University of London, where she served as Dean of Arts and Vice-Principal for Research and International Affairs before taking on the role of Provost and Senior Vice President (Arts & Sciences) at King’s College London.

Professor Welch has led a range of major research programmes including The Material Renaissance which was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Getty Foundation, Beyond Text: Performances, Sounds, Images, Objects, a £5.5 million AHRC strategic research programme which ran from 2005-2012 and the Humanities in the European Research Area Fashioning the Early Modern project. She has published extensively on European art and material culture including books such as Art in Renaissance Italy (Oxford, 200), Shopping in the Renaissance (Yale, 2005), Making and Marketing Medicine in Renaissance Florence (Rodopi, 2011), Fashioning the Early Modern: Dress, Textiles and Innovation in Europe, 1500-1800 (Oxford, 2017). Professor Welch currently serves as the Chair of the Warburg Institute Advisory Council, Chair of Trustees of the Dulwich Picture Gallery and sits on the British Library Advisory Board . She is currently the Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator working on a major project on Renaissance Skin.

Research Summary

Evelyn Welch leads the project and will be publishing a number of essays, articles and books as part of Renaissance Skin including articles underway on:

• ‘Smoking, Snuffing and the Smell of Masculinity in Early Modern Europe’
  
•  ‘Breaking Skin in Early Modern Europe’ 
  

Key Interests

• Science and medicine in Early Modern Europe 
• Professional expertise and "structures" of skin
• Skin Collecting
• Global Skins 

Biography

I am a historian of early modern Europe, with a special focus on science and medicine. I did my undergraduate degree in my home country of Ireland (TCD), before heading to the States for a PhD in Berkeley. Before joining the Renaissance Skin team, I was a Junior Research Fellow at Oriel College, Oxford. I've written about libraries, physicians, anatomy, letter-writing, ordinances, artisans, and calligraphy. My first book, A New Order of Medicine: The Rise of Physicians in Reformation Nuremberg, which recently appeared with the University of Pittsburgh Press, draws some of those themes together.

Research Summary

As the lead researcher on the project, I take an interest in all things 'skin'. In the earlier stages of our project, my work focused on the medical culture of skin in Reformation Germany - how vernacular knowledge, epidemic disease and changing scholarly practices contributed to a new focus on skin disease. I have an article forthcoming on this subject in Bulletin for the History of Medicine, and I am editing a collection of essays on "Skin in Early Modern Medicine", featuring everything from leprosy to dog-mange. More recently, I've begun to examine broad trends in European medical writers' engagement with "Global Skins".  This interest led to a major conference in September 2019. I'm currently working on two article-length projects on this: one on the treatment of 'skin before colour' in early dermatological treatises, the other on the reconceptualization of "African" materia medica in the sixteenth century. 

Key Interests

• Late medieval and early modern animal history
  
• Late medieval and early modern history of medicine, in particular, pharmacology and toxicology
  
• Late medieval and early modern science, in particular, natural history.
  
• Medieval natural magic
  
• Palaeography and digital editions of texts

Biography

Dr Walker-Meikle’s research interests focus on the relationship between animals and humans, particularly in medicine and natural history. She received her PhD from University College London, and published Medieval Pets (Boydell & Brewer, 2012), the first social and cultural study of companion animals in the late medieval period. Kathleen received a Wellcome Trust fellowship grant to examine animal bites and toxicology in the late medieval period. Kathleen has a strong interest in palaeography, manuscript studies, and digital humanities, and has worked on the Antidotarium magnum with Professor Monica Green (Arizona State University), with the Consortium of European Research Libraries on archival digital infrastructures and at University College Cork on Irish humanism and palaeography. She was recently a research fellow at UCL on the Inner Lives project, examining late medieval cosmology, magic, astrology, and emotions. On the Renaissance Skin project she will be focusing on animal skin and diseases afflicting the skin.

Research Summary

A major focus in the course of the Renaissance Skin project will involve examining ideas and descriptions of animal skin, especial fur, feathers and horns. I am particularly interested in examining European texts on ‘new’ animals from Asia and the New World. This will contribute to our knowledge on the changing ideas of animal skin in a globalised world in the period 1450 and 1700, and the connections and differences between human and animal skins, in textual, material and iconographic culture.

I will also look at the damage caused to animal and human skin, mainly from diseases such as smallpox, syphilis, scrofula, cancer, leprosy, lupus, and will also draw on previous research on the bites and stings of animals). A wide of variety of sources will be consulted, from pharmacological preparations to treat such afflictions to their appearance in literature and iconography.

Kathleen is currently on secondment at the V&A (Jan 2020 to end June 2020). 

Key Interests

• Early modern science and medicine
• Cross-cultural and trans-national histories
• Global skins and global networks
• Early modern material culture and cultures of collecting

Biography

Sebestian is a historian of early modern science and medicine, with a special interest in cross-cultural histories, exchanges of knowledge and objects on a global scale (and anything to do with the Jesuits). He received his PhD from the University of Cambridge in 2019. Focusing on the Philippines, his dissertation traced the production and communication of natural and medical knowledge across three continents, from London and English colonial outposts in India to Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese imperial settlements in Asia and America. He has published on long-distance networks of knowledge exchange and Renaissance geography and co-edited a BJHS special issue on science and islands in Indo-Pacific worlds.

Research Summary

On the Renaissance Skin project, Sebestian will be focusing on the role of skin in mediating transfers of knowledge and practices across different cultures. Relying predominantly on sources written by Catholic missionaries, his research will investigate the uses and understandings of skin in colonial settings around the globe, with a special focus on diseases, monstrosities and medical and surgical practices. Sebestian is also interested in European encounters with ‘global skins’ and will examine early modern accounts of the tattooing practices of indigenous peoples of the Philippines. His main aim is to explore how these interactions changed and challenged early modern European conceptions about skin against the backdrop of the increasingly globalised world.

Biography

Rebecca graduated from the University of Exeter with a BA in Ancient History and Archaeology. She has worked at King’s College London in project based roles since 2015, and holds a PRINCE2 Practitioner qualification in project management.

Rebecca is the project manager, a role that involves organising project events and activities, all external and internal communication, and financial management.

Key Interests

• Early modern material culture
  
• Porcelain and collecting
• Early modern dress & textiles
• Merchants and luxury suppliers in the early modern period

Biography

Juliet was awarded her doctorate in 2012 from Queen Mary, University of London under the supervision of Professor Evelyn Welch. Her research explored the economic, trade and social context of Asian porcelain in England from 1588-1700.  She has taught on undergraduate modules at Queen Mary and has worked as a project coordinator on both the HERA –funded project ‘Fashioning the Early Modern’ and a joint V&A/King’s College initiative ‘Early Modern Dress in Your Hands’.

Research Summary

Juliet is currently researching two areas within the Renaissance Skin project.  She is looking at the connections between porcelain and skin, both as a literary trope and the physical depiction of animal and human skin within ceramic glazes. She is also studying the development and use of leather in 17^th century men’s armour.  In particular she is studying the ‘buff coat’ that was worn by men at arms throughout Europe in the early modern period.  The buff coat offered a lighter weight protection in battle and freed soldiers from the constrictions of traditional plate armour in-line with the changing nature of 17^th century warfare and weapons.  The ubiquitous nature of the garment meant that it was adopted as the universal symbol of a soldier and it appears in many portraits and group militia paintings of the period.