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10/16/2024

Year of Post-Doctoral Fellowships for Dr. Lacy Gillette

College of Fine Arts

This fall, Dr. Lacy Gillette (PhD ’22) takes up residence in Gotha, Germany as a Herzog-Ernst Postdoctoral Fellow at the Gotha Research Centre of the University of Erfurt. The Gotha Research Library and Centre at Friedenstein Castle preserves outstanding collections on the cultural history of the early modern period and is one of the most important sites of historical holdings from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries in Germany. Lacy will be expanding upon her research into the work of Nuremberg printmaker Jost Amman begun in her dissertation “People Watching in Paper Worlds: Jost Amman (1539-1591) and Picturing the ‘Type’ in the Sixteenth-Century Illustrated Book.”  

Dr. Gillette’s larger book project recontextualizes Amman’s woodcut illustrations of people within a broader early modern impetus to collect, organize, and create social identities. She seeks to provide the first critical analysis of Amman’s oeuvre, evaluating visual evidence across a range of media, including printed books, manuscripts, metalwork, and maps. Her goal is to explain the nuanced production of social networks following in the wake of the Reformation as sacred and secular identities were commodified by and for eager, early modern audiences. 

Lacy was also awarded two short-term research fellowships in 2024 – one at the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California, and another at the Newberry Library in Chicago, Illinois. During the month of May, Lacy examined works by Amman’s contemporaries and translated texts across multiple genres at the Huntington. These natural histories, world histories, and moralizing fables coalesce around the evolution of the figure in their similar pursuit to standardize categories of peoples.

As a Newberry Library Fellow in March, Lacy expanded her dissertation analysis of Amman’s book projects by examining Amman’s religious and historical figures that were manipulated by visual experimentations of sixteenth-century publishers. Amman’s figures pop on and off the page of a variety of unrelated works and confront our understanding of early modern book genres. During her time as a Newberry Library Fellow, Lacy presented her ongoing research at the annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America in Chicago. Her paper, “What’s in a Name? Paper Antiquities in Sixteenth-Century Printed Kunstbücher,” considered antiquity and the significance of classical visual templates that paraded across an array of printed “stages” and geographical boundaries. Lacy integrates these various components of her research for her larger project this fall in Gotha.  

Crucifixion of Christ, Jost Amman, woodcut, Icones Novi Testamenti (Frankfurt: Sigmund Feyerabend, 1571)