Education
Biography
Stephanie Porras specializes in the visual and material culture of Northern Europe and the Spanish world, from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries. Before coming to Tulane, she previously taught at Columbia University, the Courtauld Institute of Art and University College London. She is Reviews Editor for the Art Bulletin and Chair of the Newcomb Art Department and on the editorial board of the Nederlands Yearbook for History of Art/Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek .
Her latest book, The First Viral Images: Maerten de Vos, Antwerp print and the early modern globe (Pennsylvania State University press, 2023) traces the complex production and reception histories of an illustrated book, a painting and an engraving, all made in Antwerp in the late sixteenth century, but copied by Venetian print publishers, Spanish and Latin American painters, Mughal miniaturists and by Filipino ivory carvers. Analyzing the social networks and infrastructures that undergirded these artworks’ mobility, she uses virality as a critical framework to reassess creative labor and art’s role in the uneven processes of early modern globalization. Some of this work has appeared in journal articles for the Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek, Colonial Latin American Review and Artl@s.
Porras is the author of Pieter Bruegel's Historical Imagination (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016) and Art of the Northern Renaissance (Laurence King, 2018). She was also co-editor of The Young Dürer: Drawing the Figure (Courtauld Institute of Art, 2013) and Picturing the Netherlandish Canon (Courtauld Books Online, 2010). She is currently working on two further book projects. The first, The Routledge Companion to the Global Renaissance, an edited volume of forty essays, with co-editor Stephen Campbell; the second, a special issue of the Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek devoted to the theme Wet Lands, co-edited with Ann-Sophie Lehmann and Joost Keizer. She has several recent and forthcoming essays and articles on topics ranging from the etched illustrations of Diego Valadés’ Rhetorica Christiana to the use of color in Netherlandish landscape drawing, for the 2022/23 Cleveland Museum of Art and Albertina exhibition Tales from the City: Drawing in the Netherlands from Bosch to Bruegel. Alongside Aaron Hyman, she has launched the Dutch Americas project, a co-taught hybrid humanities lab course investigating the West India Company’s role in shaping the visual and material cultures of the Atlantic world.
Her research, publications and teaching have been supported by grants and fellowships from the Renaissance Society of America, the College Art Association, Historians of Netherlandish Art, the New York Public Library, the J. Paul Getty Foundation, the British Academy, the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art. Dr. Porras is delighted to work with graduate students interested in print culture, migrant artists and mobile artworks, practices of copying and replication, competing notions of antiquity and the everyday in the early modern period.
Contributions
“Reviewing Reviews in the Art Bulletin,” The Art Bulletin 105, no. 4 (December 2023): 6-9. (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00043079.2023.2263327)
“Foul biting, or Diego Valadés and the Medium of Print,” Art History 46.5 (November 2023): 866-94. (https://academic.oup.com/arthistory/article/46/5/866/7611931)
with Ann-Sophie Lehmann and Joost Keizer, “Wet land’s Past Futures,” in Ann-Sophie Lehmann, Joost Keizer, and Stephanie Porras(eds.) Wetlands: Shaping environments in Netherlandish art and architecture, Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 73 (2023), 6-29.
The First Viral Images: Maerten de Vos, Antwerp print and the early modern globe (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2023). (https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-09283-6.html)
“Forgetting how to see,” in Ruth Sargent Noyes, (ed.) Reassessing Epistemic Images in the Early Modern World (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023), 263-85.
“Paper capital: Drawings on Colored Grounds in Antwerp Workshops around 1520,” in Tales of the City: Drawing in the Netherlands from Bosch to Bruegel. (Cleveland and Vienna: Cleveland Museum of Art and Albertina, exhibition catalogue, 2022/3).
“Seeing ‘de flandes’,” in W. Melion and A. DiFuria (eds.), Ekphrastic Image Making (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2021).
"Locating Hispano-Philippine ivories," Colonial Latin American Review 29:2 (2020): 256-291.
*Recipient of the Franklin Pease G.Y. Memorial Prize for the best article published in 2019 and 2020 in Colonial Latin American Review
Art of the Northern Renaissance: Courts, Commerce and Devotion (Laurence King, 2018).
“Keeping our eyes open: visualizing networks and art history,” Artl@s Bulletin 6.3 (Winter 2017). Article 3.
Pieter Bruegel's Historical Imagination, (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016).
“Going viral? Maerten de Vos’s St Michael the Archangel,” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 66 (2016): 54-78.
“St. Michael the Archangel: Spiritual, visual and material translations from Antwerp to Lima,” in E. Wouk and S. Karr-Schmidt, Prints in Translation, 1450-1750: Image, Materiality, Space (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2016), 183-202.
“Copies, cannibals and conquerors: Maarten de Vos’s The Big Fish eat the Small,” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 64 (2014).
“Dürer’s copies,” in The Young Dürer: Drawing the Figure, eds. Stephanie Buck and Stephanie Porras (London: Courtauld Institute and Paul Holberton, 2013).
“‘ein freie hant:’ Autonomy, Drawing and the Young Dürer,” in Der frühe Dürer, ed. Daniel Hess and Thomas Eser (exhibition catalogue, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg, 2012).
“Folds, Traces and Holes: Dürer's Ideal Bodies,” in G. Ulrich Grossman and Petra Krutisch, The Challenge of the Object / Die Herausforderung des Objekts: The Proceedings of the 33rd Congress of the International Committee of the History of Art (Nuremberg: Germanischen Nationalmuseums, 2013).
“Producing the Vernacular: Antwerp, Cultural Archaeology and the Bruegelian Peasant,”Journal of the Historians of Netherlandish Art 3.1 (Winter 2010/11).
“Repeat Viewing: Hendrick Hondius’s Effigies” available at Picturing the Netherlandish Canon online exhibition, curated by Stephanie Porras and Joanna Woodall, funded by the British Academy, 2010.
“Rural Memory, Pagan Idolatry: Pieter Bruegel's Peasant Shrines,” Art History 34.3 (June 2011).
Recently Supervised MA Theses
“Continuous Threads: Structure-Privileging and Andean Thought in We are Seven,” MA 2024
“Silver Threads: Dutch Domestic Objects during the colonial transition from New Netherland to New York,” MA 2024
“Becoming Brazilian: The Brazilian cultural performance in Henri II’s 1550 royal entry into Rouen,” MA 2019
“The Emulative Copy: Andrea del Sarto’s 1525 Pope Leo X with Two Cardinals,” MA 2016
“Made In China: Chinese Export Art And Its European Reception In The Seventeenth Century,” MA 2016
“Performing Artistic Control: Gian Lorenzo Bernini And His Caricature Drawings," MA 2015
Courses
- Albrecht Dürer
- Amsterdam as Global Capital of the Dutch Golden Age
- Copies, Creativity and Contagion (studio art and art history)
- Dutch Americas
- Early Modern Copies
- Jesuits and the Globe
- Print, Power and Knowledge in the Early Modern period
- Rubens to Rembrandt: Flemish and Dutch art of the 17th century
- Theaters of the Baroque
- The Spaces of Art
- Van Eyck to Bruegel: Northern Renaissance Art
- What is a Copy? (Honors Colloquium funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities Enduring Questions program, www.whatisacopy.com/omeka)