Tianna Helena Uchacz

Dr. Tianna Helena Uchacz is a historian of craft technology and early modern Netherlandish art. Her research asks questions about art media and materials, skilled making, the sensory experiences of artists and viewers, and ways of knowing in early modern cultures across the globe. From 2016 to 2020, Uchacz was senior postdoctoral scholar on the Making and Knowing Project (Columbia University), an interdisciplinary research and pedagogical initiative to study a sixteenth-century manuscript of artisanal recipes through wet lab reconstructions and digital textual analyses. She is co-editor of “Secrets of Craft and Nature in Renaissance France. A Digital Critical Edition and English Translation of BnF Ms. Fr. 640” (https://edition640.makingandknowing.org), winner of the 2019 Eugene S. Ferguson Prize from the Society for the History of Technology. She is co-editing a volume on the workspaces of early modern artists and artisans (Bard Graduate Center, expected 2022). Her work has appeared in “Renaissance Quarterly”, “Isis”, and “Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek” as well as collected volumes including “Netherlandish Culture of the Sixteenth Century” and “Ornament and Monstrosity in Early Modern Art”. She has held fellowships at Utrecht University, the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, and the Science History Institute, and she is a 2021-2022 Faculty Research Fellow at the Glasscock Humanities Center at Texas A&M.

ORCID: 0000-0002-5512-4874

Teaching:
ARTS 150
VIZA 630

Early modern / Renaissance art, Netherlandish art, ornament design, digital humanities, history of science, history of art techniques, artisanal skill, tacit knowledge, epistemology, critical making, historical recipe reconstruction