DrCAROLINE PAGANUSSI

My research examines medieval and early modern visual culture—especially in Italy and Iberia—through questions of gender and sexuality, devotion and religious experience, and the intellectual worlds that shaped artistic production. I work across art history, museum studies, and digital humanities, with particular attention to materiality (wax, bronze, relics), collecting and display, and the social and environmental conditions—including climate and agricultural change—that inform images and their meanings.

• Medieval and early modern art (Italy and Iberia)
• Italian Renaissance and Baroque art
• Artistic production in seventeenth-century Manila
• Artistic production in Bologna and Naples
• Gender, sexuality, and the body
• Devotion, relics, reliquaries, and sacred materiality
• Wax sculpture / ceroplastics; multisensory religious experience
• Art, ecology, climate, agriculture, and labor (ecocritical approaches)
• Museums, collecting, exhibitions, and curatorial practice
• Digital art history and pedagogy (Omeka/Neatline; XR/immersive learning)
• Cross-cultural exchange and global object histories (early modern networks)