Thomas Willette Assistant Professor U of M Affiliation(s) Residential College PhD Johns Hopkins University

Thomas Willette holds a joint appointment in the Department of the History of Art and the Residential College (Arts and Ideas Program). His research focuses on the art and intellectual culture of early modern Europe (c. 1450-1800), particularly Italy and the larger sphere of Italian influence and exchange. His interests include the impact of humanism and the emulation of ancient arts and letters, the uses of style and figurative imagery in visual art, poetry and natural philosophy, and the development of art-historical literature, including lives of artists, theoretical treatises and national histories. He is currently editing a volume of essays on early modern Naples and researching the publication history and reception of Benvenuto Cellini's autobiography.

Thomas Willette is co-director (with Thomas Green, Law School and History Department) of the Premodern Colloquium, a long-standing reading and discussion group for faculty and graduate students in medieval and early modern studies. The Colloquium meets four times each semester to discuss work in progress by area scholars and invited visitors from the U.S. and abroad, in all fields of historical research from late antiquity to the eighteenth century.

Books:

Art History in the Age of Bellori: Scholarship and Cultural Politics in 17th-Century Rome. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002 (co-edited with Janis Bell).

Massimo Stanzione. Naples: Electa Napoli, 1992 (co-authored with Sebastian
Schuetze).

Articles:

"È stata opera di critica onesta, liberale, italiana: Benedetto Croce and 'Napoli Nobilissima' 1892-1906)," in The Legacy of Benedetto Croce: Contemporary Critical Views, ed. Jack D'Amico, Dain A. Trafton and Massimo Verdicchio, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999, pp. 52-87. Reprinted in Italian translation in Napoli nobilissima, 5th series. I, no. 1-2 2000), pp. 5-30.

"1799/1899: Heroic Memory in the Centennial of the Neapolitan Republic," Journal of Modern Italian Studies, IV, no. 3 (1999), pp. 369-379.

"Notes on the Publication History of Bernardo De Dominici's Vite," in Napoli, L'Europa: Ricerche di storia dell'arte in onore di Ferdinando Bologna, Catanzaro: Meridiana Libri, 1995, pp. 271-275.

"Biography, Historiography, and the Image of Francesco Solimena," in Angelo e Francesco Solimena: due culture a confronto, ed. Vega de Martini and Antonio Braca, Naples: Fausto Fiorentino, 1994, pp. 201-208.

"Fowl Play: Eros and Equivocation in a Neapolitan Portrait," in Papers in Art History from The Pennsylvania State University, Vol. VII, ed. Jeanne Chenault Porter and Susan Scott Munshower, University Park (PA), 1993, pp. 230-248.