Andrea Kibler Maxwell

As a Teaching Assistant Professor and the Lead Undergraduate Advisor for the History of Art and Architecture Department, I am dedicated to teaching and guiding undergraduate students during their time at Pitt. I draw on my graduate training in both art history and clinical psychology in a holistic approach to mentorship that considers the entirety of a student’s life and goals while in college and facilitates student-driven agency in their higher education career. As one of the university’s “Mental Health Champions,” I prioritize student mental health and wellbeing. Being a first-generation college student, I know how complex and stressful navigating coursework and schedule-planning can be, and I strive to alleviate student concerns while charting the best path forward for each individual student. For one-on-one advising, I work directly with History of Art and Architecture and Museum Studies majors. My colleagues, Jennifer Donnelly and Gabe Nolle conduct one-on-one advising meetings with our Architecture Studies students, but I welcome all HAA majors and minors to email me or stop by my office.

As a teacher, I focus on global narratives and histories that challenge teleological and canonical surveys and allow students to develop agency and ownership in their own education. My specialties range from Ancient to Modern, and my favorite areas are Medieval through Baroque. I prioritize thematic approaches and highlighting multiple regions and creators when designing courses. My goal is to introduce students to a wide variety of artworks and artmakers in every course, so each student can find what interests them. I am confident even non-majors can find something that sparks curiosity and intrigue in art history courses!

My research interests focus on early modern Italian art and theology, and I am particularly fascinated by art and artists from Lombardy, the Veneto, and the Marche regions of Italy. My most recent research examines fifteenth- and sixteenth-century paintings and religious discourse to reveal how pictures were mobilized to both formulate and oppose certain religious out-groups. In my dissertation, "Painting and Persecution: Anti-Jewish and Anti-Protestant Visual Rhetoric in Northern Italy, 1475-1550," I traced the ways in which anti-Jewish imagery transformed to include the new Reformation heretic throughout the Alpine region of Italy. Here, I demonstrated how a series of choices that artists and their patrons made developed art in support of the Catholic Church and formulated local communal identity and belief systems regarding religious others. In the past, I have focused on works in and around Florence, such as the Brancacci Chapel. At the heart of all my research is the interconnectivity of image, text, and theology, and how people invent visual evidence to justify their beliefs.