Professor Stephanie Leitch Receives COFRS Grant

Art History Associate Professor Stephanie Leitch was awarded a Committee on Faculty Research Support (COFRS) grant for the summer of 2014 by the Council on Research and Creativity at FSU to research a book project about the visual rhetoric of observation in the print culture of early modern northern Europe.

The Art of Observation in the Early Modern Print (1500–1700) will examine how first-hand observations came to be recorded in images in several printed genres that claimed to reproduce unmediated experience with the world. Prints in these diverse genres helped cue observations, calibrate sightings and thus sharpen visual acuity. These texts delivered strategies for observing human, terrestrial and cosmographic phenomena through images. In arguing for the kinship of visual tactics found in epistemic genres such as cosmography and natural history, as well as how-to texts like physiognomies and artists’ manuals, this book aims to show how images helped elevate the testimony of the firsthand observer to a status where it could compete with ancient wisdom. The paradoxically non-naturalistic formal properties that characterized these images served the twin goals of recording empirical experience and organizing that data into disciplinary knowledge.

For more information on Stephanie Leitch’s current research and other publications, visit her faculty profile.