Jeanette Kohl is Professor of Italian Renaissance Art at the University of California, Riverside.
Since 2021, she is also one of two directors of UCR’s Center for Ideas and Society. She earned her PhD from the University of Trier in 2001, was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence (2001–2004), Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin at the University of Leipzig (2004–2008) and Visiting Professor at Friedrich-Schiller-University in Jena (2007). She received major fellowships from the NEH (2012), the Getty Research Institute (2014), and the Morphomata Center for Advanced Studies at Köln University (2015), among others. In 2018/19, she was the Agnes Gund and Daniel Shapiro Member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

Her art historical research focuses on portraiture, sculpture, and concepts of mimesis, memory, and representation in the Italian Renaissance. As co-organizer of a new Medical and Health Humanities program, she has also developed interests in deep interdisciplinarity, intellectual history, and the history of medicine. She has currently two books in preparation: Wings and Feathers in Early Modern Art and Thought: Meanings. Media. Materiality (with Barbara Baert) and a monograph on bust portraits: The Life of Busts. Sculpted Portraits in Fifteenth-Century Italy.

At HIAS, Kohl will continue work on her book on bust portraits and start a new project: Sculpture. A History in Sources and Commentaries – a long-overdue sourcebook on the history of European sculpture since antiquity that combines selected art historical source texts with commentaries by international experts in the field.

Her collaboration partner is Iris Wenderholm, Professor of European Art History of the Early Modern Period at Universität Hamburg.

Jeanette Kohl’s HIAS fellowship is provided by the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg and the federal and state funds acquired by Universität Hamburg in the framework of its Excellence Strategy.