Jessica Keating

Education & Professional History

Northwestern University, PhD

Jessica Keating is Associate Professor of Art History at Carleton College. Professor Keating’s research and teaching addresses the history of art in early modern Europe, focusing particularly on the intertwined histories of collecting; technology; cultural contact and exchange; and empire and sovereignty. Her book, Animating Empire: Automata, the Holy Roman Empire and the Early Modern World (Penn State University Press, 2018) explores the religious and political histories of six clockwork automata that were produced and collected in the Holy Roman Empire during the second half of the sixteenth century. Currently she is working on the question of how the Kunstkammer of Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II (r. 1576-1612) represented sovereignty. She is also in the process of completing a short book, Impossible Nature: The World of Giuseppe Arcimboldo, which is forthcoming with Reaktion Books.

Books

Animating Empire: The Holy Roman Empire, Automata, and the Early Modern World, The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018.

Recent Articles

“Hidden in plain sight: On copiousness in the Kunstkammer of Emperor Rudolf II,” Journal of the History of Collections, 2021; fhab009, https://doi.org/10.1093/jhc/fhab009

“The Automaton” in The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque. ed. John Lyons (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019): 185-210.

Co-author with Lia Markey, “Medievalists and Early Modernists—A World Divided?” The Medieval Globe 3.2 (2017) 203-218.

Co-author with Lia Markey, “Medievalists and Early Modernists—A World Divided?” (re-published) in Re-Assessing the Global Turn in Medieval Art History, ed. Christina Normore, (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018): 203-218.

“Otto Kurz’s Global Vision” in The Globalization of Renaissance Art: A Critical Review. ed. Daniel Savoy, (Boston: Brill, 2017): 45-66.

“Metamorphosis at the Mughal Court,” Art History, 38 (September 2015): 732-747.