Emily Hyatt

Emily Hyatt is a PhD student who works on the histories of early modern art and visual culture in Italy and its networks north of the Alps, with a focus on (inter)materiality, process and labor, and the circulation of objects, materials, and technologies. 

She is particularly interested in the ecological dimensions of early modern sculpture and its links to processes of reuse, material extraction, and decay. Emily has written about the uses of plants in sixteenth-century Venetian workshops, iconographies of the fire stoker, and links between Italian glass production and Saxon mines. Her current research examines the spread of cartapesta and similar technologies to ask how paper’s use as a “poor” modeling medium participated in devotional, artisanal, and scientific regimes in fifteenth–seventeenth-century Europe. 

Emily holds a BA in Art History and Visual Art from Columbia University and an MA in Transcultural Studies (with distinction) from Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg in Germany, where her thesis was supervised by Professor Monica Juneja and Professor Rebecca Müller. She has also worked as a research project coordinator at the Universität Heidelberg and as a museum educator in New York City. 

Her article “Sì in Muran come fuora de Muran”: Transcultural Itineraries and Material Counternarratives in Venetian Glass, c. 1450–1650” has been published in The Journal of Transcultural Studies.  Her work has also been supported by the Deutsches Forum für Kunstgeschichte Paris.

At Yale, she is a 2024–2025 Whitney Humanities Center Fellow in the Environmental Humanities.