Claire N. Ptaschinski

I am a 2023–2024 Andrew W. Mellon Predoctoral Fellow and Associated Researcher at the Koninklijk Nederlands Instituut Rome (KNIR). There I am working on my dissertation, "Designing Baroque Ecologies: Dynamic Altar Spaces in Rome, 1640–1720," which examines how ecological ontologies and experiences transformed the Baroque built environment and integrated chapel spaces into Rome's urban landscape and broader global networks.

My research sits at the intersection of ecocriticism, new materialism, and environmental history, and adopts their critical methods to chart the intersection between natural elements (geology, weather, sunlight, etc.) and complex social ecosystems that facilitate the construction of built environments in the 17th century. My MA Thesis, “The Ecology of Chapel Design in Baroque Rome,” which won the 2021 Early Modern Worlds Biennial Graduate Essay Prize at the University of Pittsburgh, built upon eco-materialism to provide a fresh analysis of three spaces in 17th-century Rome. In Summer 2021, I received funding from the Bibliotheca Hertziana to participate in the Summer School, “Cultures of Science and Art in Rome, 1400-1900,” cosponsored by the KNIR, to advance this research and explore the common visual language embedded in the design of the high altar of Santa Caterina a Magnanapoli and early modern mineralogical printed books. My dissertation develops this material to analyze Roman Baroque chapels in the long 17th century by considering media and typologies of the built environment through the theological, natural-historical, and artistic languages used to describe them, thereby revealing an ecological mindset and transforming our conception of the Baroque bel composto.

I began my graduate studies in the History of Art and Architecture at Pitt in 2019 after spending several years working in museums, publishing, and academic administration. Just prior to joining Pitt’s department, I worked in the Center for Renaissance Studies at the Newberry Library in Chicago where I had the opportunity to contribute to the development of a new Italian Paleography website, a digital resource for the study of the Newberry’s hybrid version of Georg Rem’s Emblemata Politica, and a print catalogue published by Northwestern University Press for the Fall 2020 exhibition, “Renaissance Invention: Stradanus’s ‘Nova Reperta.’”