Art History Professor Elisabeth Fraser Releases Edited Book, Conducts Research with Support of NEH Fellowship

Friday, March 13, 2020

Congratulations to USF Professor of Art History Elisabeth Fraser for the publication of her edited book, Mobility of People and Things in the Early Modern Mediterranean: The Art of Travel.

The book, published by Routledge, comprises chapters by seven scholars and Fraser herself. 

Fraser is currently working on another book, Dressing the Ottoman Empire: Costume Books and Transculturation, with the support of a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Fellowship for 2020-21. This is an institutional NEH award that comes with an appointment as Senior Associate Member at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens.

Elisabeth will be doing research at the School’s Gennadius Library for Dressing the Ottoman Empire, looking at its extensive collection of costume albums and books depicting the diverse peoples of the Ottoman Empire from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries.

About Mobility of People and Things in the Early Modern Mediterranean

For centuries artists, diplomats, and merchants served as cultural intermediaries in the Mediterranean. Stationed in port cities and other entrepôts of the Mediterranean, these go-betweens forged intercultural connections even as they negotiated and sometimes promoted cultural misunderstandings. They also moved objects of all kinds across time and space. This volume considers how the mobility of art and material culture is intertwined with greater Mediterranean networks from 1580 to 1880. Contributors see the movement of people and objects as transformational, emphasizing the trajectory of objects over single points of origin, multiplicity over unity, and mutability over stasis.