Jericho Jennifer Nelson

Jericho Jennifer Nelson

Associate Professor
Early Modern Art
 

Biography

Jericho 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, 鈥淎rt and the Other: The Ends of Early World Christendom,鈥 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鈥攑erhaps even misappropriate鈥攁n eme鈥嬧媟ging 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鈥媗 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听听(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鈥媋n communities. Nelson鈥檚 first book,听听(Penn State, 2019), won the 2021 Historians of British Art Prize for a book on a subject before 1600. It describe鈥嬧媠 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 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 鈥媋n AB in Literature with a Citation in Ancient Greek from Harvard College.鈥嬏

Selected Publications

Reviews of听, for听Art Bulletin, vol. 107 no. 2 (2025), 148鈥153.

鈥,鈥澨Representations, vol. 168 no. 1 (Fall 2024), 55-87.

鈥,鈥 I Tatti Studies, vol. 26 no. 2 (Fall 2023), 347鈥370.

,鈥 The Art Bulletin, vol. 104 no. 4 (Dec. 2022), 20-45.

,鈥 Word & Image, vol. 37 no. 4 (2021), 371-382.

Disharmony of the Spheres: The Europe of Holbein鈥檚 Ambassadors (Penn State University Press, 2019; paperback, 2020).

Photo Credit for headshot:Kevin Grady