Messbarger
Messbarger, professor of Italian in Arts & Sciences, said winning the two awards was “a complete surprise” and she is grateful for the validation the prizes give her book project.
The article, “The Re-Birth of Venus in Florence’s Royal Museum of Physics and Natural History,” appeared in the Journal of the History of Collections in 2012. It won the James L. Clifford Prize from the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and the Percy G. Adams Prize, awarded by the Southeastern American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.
Messbarger also is grateful for the resources afforded her as a faculty fellow. She will be freed from teaching and administrative duties and provided an office in the Center for the Humanities.
“As a faculty fellow, among the most important resources I will have is the time to research and write,” said Messbarger, who is also a professor of women, gender and sexuality studies, in Arts & Sciences. “Having the mental space to think has always marked the difference for me between a scholarly project that is competent and one that moves vivaciously in new directions.”
She also looks forward to collaborating with other faculty fellows.
“I will have a community, a precious thing to me,” she said. “I am not a scholar who relishes solitary study or alone time with my computer. I need colleagues with whom I can discuss my work and hear about theirs.
“This collaborative exchange among fellows and graduate students is a central part of the program and an aspect of my semester there about which I am particularly excited.”
Messbarger’s major research interests center on Italian Enlightenment culture, in particular the place and purpose of women in civic, academic and social life, and the intersection of art and science in the production of anatomical wax models during the age.
Her new book will focus on the real and symbolic links and ruptures between a wax, life-size Anatomical Venus created in Enlightenment-era Florence and the Venus de Medici of the Renaissance. The wax Venus was on display in the Royal Museum of Physics and Natural History, founded by Archduke of Tuscany Peter Leopold in 1775 “as a means to overthrow the regressive cultural authority of the Medici dynasty and launch a new era of Enlightenment.”
Messbarger was chosen to be a Center for the Humanities faculty fellow because her book project “is a fascinating and well-conceived project with wide-ranging appeal,” said Erin McGlothlin, PhD, interim director of the Center for the Humanities and associate professor of German in Arts & Sciences.
McGlothlin said the faculty fellows program provides research support for humanities scholars, who typically have fewer external opportunities for such support than their colleagues in nonhumanities fields.
“The goal of the program is to generate greater innovation in scholarship and teaching across disciplines in the humanities by providing fellowship for projects that involve interdisciplinary sharing and exchange,” she said.
McGlothlin can speak firsthand about the benefits of the fellowship. She was a member of the first class of Center for the Humanities faculty fellows in spring 2006.
“Not only did my faculty fellowship give me the time and resources critical for developing my research,” she said, “it also allowed me the opportunity to journey outside the confines of my home discipline and enter into a larger dialogue about the role of the humanities at Washington University in particular and in our contemporary culture more generally.”
To learn more about Messbarger’s research and previous publications, visit here.