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Ruth Sargent Noyes
Trained at Harvard University (BA) and Johns Hopkins University (MA, PhD), I work on the artistic, religious, and intellectual culture of Europe and its borderlands, ca. 1400-1800. My research studies paintings, prints, and drawings; hagiography, relics and reliquaries; the sciences, especially mathematics, optics, astronomy, and microscopy; migration and refugees; architecture and landscape; patronage and society. I work on historical territories corresponding to areas of current-day Italy, France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. Since 2018 I have built expertise in grant proposal training (with special focus on Marie Skłodowska-Curie), mentoring and training PhDs and postdocs in humanities fields, English-language editing of academic writing for international scholars of all career levels, and teaching academic writing at the MA and PhD levels. My work has been supported by awards from the American Academy in Rome, Dahlem Humanities Center (FU Berlin), Novo Nordisk Fonden, Fritz Thyssen Stiftung, and ERC. In 2020-23, I was Marie Skłodowska-Curie EU Senior Research Fellow at the National Museum of Denmark. Following an international career, family circumstances have brought me to settle in Estonia, where I am raising my young son. My recent scholarship situates the art and architecture of early modern northeastern (especially Baltic) Europe in its global context. My current project, working title “Empires of Fur: Art, Nature, Labor, and the Making of Early Modern Europe,” maps through works of art c. 1400-1600 entanglements of Baltic-mediated animal fur and forms of human and non-human animal labor. Taking the multi-faceted concept of ‘labor’ as a kind of heuristic, the project examines how artistic depictions of and cultural production around pelts sourced largely through Livonia defined Renaissance humanism, and shaped ideas of what it was to be ‘human’ in ‘Europe’ during a time of environmental, religious, social, and cultural upheaval. Research for this project has resulted in a number of conference papers, lectures, and publications.
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ORCID: 0000-0002-8099-680X