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Senior Lecturer in Art History, The Open University

Leah R Clark is a Senior Lecturer in Art History at the Open University, UK. Her research explores the roles objects play in creating networks in the fifteenth century through their exchange, collection, and replication.

She is author of Collecting Art in the Italian Renaissance Court: Objects and Exchanges (Cambridge University Press, 2018). She is co-editor (with Kathleen Christian) of a textbook on the global Renaissance, European Art and the Wider World 1350-1550 (Manchester University Press, 2017). She has received awards and fellowships from a variety of institutions including the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Italian Government, the Arts and Humanities Research Council UK, and the British Academy.

Her next book project investigates how objects and materials functioned as diplomatic agents in cross-cultural relations. It explores the transformative processes of their translation and transfer, which allowed for materials and motifs to become incorporated into local visual culture and production in fifteenth-century Italy.

She is also co-investigator (with Dr Katherine Wilson, Chester) of an interdisciplinary research network examining the mobility of objects across and beyond European boundaries during the period (1000-1700) funded by the AHRC.

Experience

  • –present
    Senior Lecturer in Art History, The Open University