Christopher Lu

Christopher Guanyu Lu studies the art and intellectual history of late Mediaeval and Early Modern Europe, focusing on fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy. Working at the intersection of word, image, and practice, he investigates how the literary context, iconography, and the material production of an artwork generate meanings that are often at odds. He is currently interested in the entangled development of ornamental designs in fifteenth-century Italian art, architecture, and book illumination before the rediscovery of grotesques, but his extensive training in Neo-Latin literature, palaeography, and history of the book has also allowed him to undertake interdisciplinary projects, including a recent discovery of a fourteenth-century treatise on Ciceronian rhetoric in the Italian vernacular soon to be published. 

Elected a Rhodes Scholar, Christopher obtained two Master’s degrees from the University of Oxford in Classics and Modern Languages (Italian). His dissertation on the Greek-to-Latin translations by the fifteenth-century English humanist John Free, followed by a critical edition based on new manuscript sources, was awarded the Gaisford Dissertation Prize. He had previously earned an M.A. in Cultural, Intellectual and Visual History with Distinction from the Warburg Institute, University of London, supported by the School of Advanced Study Studentship, with a dissertation on the incunable Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499). He holds a joint B.A. degree in Philosophy from Fudan University, Shanghai, and the University of Birmingham, UK, having received twice the National Scholarship of China and the JG Davies Memorial Prize for his dissertation on Simone de Beauvoir.

In addition to research, Christopher is a published translator, having rendered into Chinese monographs by French philosophers Julia Kristeva and Paul Ricœur. Committed to introducing more Early Modern literature to readers in his native country, China, he has recently embarked on the translation of the writings by the fifteenth-century Italian polymath Leon Battista Alberti.