Recipes for early modern beauty

Professor Jill Burke is Chair of Renaissance Visual and Material Cultures at the University of Edinburgh. She has published widely on the history of art, gender and the body. She is currently Principal Investigator of a Royal Society-funded project, Renaissance Goo, working with a soft-matter scientist to remake 16th-century cosmetic and skincare recipes. She was on the curatorial team of ‘The Renaissance Nude’ exhibition at the J Paul Getty Museum and the Royal Academy, London in 2018–19. Her first book, ‘Changing Patrons’, questions the motivations behind Italian Renaissance art patronage and her second, ‘The Italian Renaissance Nude’, was nominated as a Choice Outstanding Academic Title in 2019.

Hayley O’Kell was recently examined for her PhD at the University of Leeds, her research funded by the White Rose College of the Arts and Humanities. Her doctoral research investigates early modern Iberian women’s agency in the realms of beauty, fashion, finance and law. She has received several awards and grants, travelling to Spain frequently as part of her research. Recently, she undertook a project working with Wellcome Collection to demonstrate the research potential of their Spanish manuscripts.

Dr Romana Sammern is Elise-Richter Fellow of the Austrian Science Fund at the Institute of Art History at the University of Salzburg, and she is coordinator of the academic programme of Figurations of Transition, an inter-university cooperation between the University of Salzburg and the University Mozarteum. Her research focuses on early modern art and knowledge, with an emphasis on the convergence of body, image and medicine. She is currently working on her second book on cosmetics and art, 1500–1800.

Patricia Akhimie is Director of the Folger Institute at the Folger Shakespeare Library. She also serves as Director of the RaceB4Race Mentoring Network and is an Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University-Newark.  She is the author of ‘Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Race: Race and Conduct in the Early Modern World’ and editor of forthcoming ‘The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Race’. Patricia is currently working on a new edition of ‘Othello’ for the Arden Shakespeare, fourth series, and a monograph about race, gender and editing early modern texts.  Her research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the John Carter Brown Library and the Ford Foundation.