Renata Nagy

Renata Nagy works on early modern northern European art. Her research is interdisciplinary across the fields of art history, material culture studies, the history of science, book history, and the history of collecting. 

Her dissertation focuses on the intersections of natural history and art both inside and outside of the printed book. She considers how user interaction allowed objects of art across media to engage with the physicality, the materiality, and the visual strategies of the natural history book, and to transform into instruments of natural historical learning beyond the book. Nagy is looking to contextualize both the objects of her inquiry and their users in the larger global network of natural history in the seventeenth century. She is particularly interested in the cross-cultural relations and exchanges between Tokugawa Japan and the Dutch Republic, a topic on which she has presented and published. Her work has been supported by the Paul Mellon Centre in London, The Huntington Library, and the MacMillan Center, among others.

Nagy is invested in curating and bringing the same level of interdisciplinary to the museum as she does to her scholarship. A former MET curatorial trainee, she is currently co-curating a Dutch art exhibition at the Yale University Art Gallery and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston both opening in 2023. She was also a recent GPE Curatorial Fellow at the Whitney/Cushing Medical Library at Yale, where she curated the online exhibition “Natural Interactions in the Book as Art and Making Knowledge.” The exhibition showcases how early modern natural history books were shaped by a variety of hands as both active works of art and sites of knowledge production about nature. 

You can check out the exhibition at: 

https://onlineexhibits.library.yale.edu/s/naturalinteractions/page/introduction