Overview
Ana Howie is Assistant Professor of Renaissance and Early Modern Art, specializing in the visual and material cultures of early modern Europe, particularly Italy and the Low Countries. Her research interests include cultures of dressing, European imperialism, colonialism, and cosmopolitanism, artisanal practices of making, object materialities, global networks of artistic exchange, and early modern race-making. Her current research investigates the relationships between elite women, global material culture, and portraiture in seventeenth-century Genoa, with a focus on the oeuvres of Flemish painters Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony van Dyck.
Recent publications include "Materializing the Global: Textiles, Color, and Race in a Genoese Portrait by Anthony van Dyck," (Renaissance Quarterly 76:2, 2023). Forthcoming publications include “Admired Head to Toe: Sumptuary Laws, Gender, and Public Dressing in Early Modern Genoa,” (The Historical Journal), and “A Moor to a Maiden: The Presence of Black Servants in the Portraiture of Louise de Kérouaille, Duchess of Portsmouth,” in Women and Cultures of Portraiture in the British Literary Renaissance (eds. Arshad and Laoutaris, 2024).
Ana holds a PhD in Early Modern History from the University of Cambridge, awarded in 2023, and an MA in the History of Art from the Courtauld Institute of Art, awarded in 2017.