Diana Bullen Presciutti is Professor and Head of History of Art. Prior to her arrival at the University of Glasgow in 2025, Diana lectured for ten years at the University of Essex (2015-2025). Trained in the United States, she has also taught at Rice University (Texas), Berea College (Kentucky), and the College of Wooster (Ohio).

Diana’s primary research addresses the visual culture of social problems, popular piety, and institutional charity in late medieval and early modern Italy (1350-1650), focusing on devotional practices, urban and extra-urban ritual, civic ideology, and intersections of class, gender, and cultural production. Her first book, Visual Cultures of Foundling Care in Renaissance Italy (Ashgate, 2015) took as its subject the visual culture of hospitals for abandoned children in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy. The central argument of the book was that visual imagery was the primary mechanism through which the patrons of these institutions—and the artists they employed—framed and promoted their charitable work. Diana's second book, Saints, Miracles, and Social Problems in Italian Renaissance Art (Cambridge UP, 2023), uncovers how images of miracles performed by mendicant saints framed and conditioned perceptions of social problems in Renaissance Italy. Throughout the peninsula, she argues, underlying issues relating to gender, sexuality, and honor manifested themselves as culturally constructed ‘social problems’, such as vendetta, adultery, infanticide, marital violence, gossip, and madness.

Diana is currently working on several research projects. One is a short book, Printing the Miraculous: Gender, Popular Religion and Everyday Life in Renaissance Italy, which surfaces non-elite viewing practices through an exploration of the woodcuts that illustrated early printed editions of the Miracoli della Vergine Maria (ca. 1500). Diana's next major project centres on the interplay between everyday devotional practices, roadside tabernacles, and the diverse topography of the Italian peninsula. Roadside Religion: Visual Culture, Ecology, and Everyday Devotion in Renaissance Italy uncovers how wayside shrines worked in productive dialogue with their surrounding environs to structure both quotidian and extraordinary patterns of prayer, invocation, and thanksgiving.

the social history of art; reception theory; intersections between social history, sociology, and art; visual hagiography; print cultures; histories of institutional charity; confraternities and lay religiosity; pilgrimage and mobility; gender and sexuality studies; art and ecology

Prior publications

Melville J. Kahn Postdoctoral Fellowship, Villa I Tatti - The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies (2017-18)

Rethinking Italian Renaissance Art (Senior Honours)

Education:

PhD, History of Art, University of Michigan, 2008

MA, Italian Renaissance Art History, Syracuse University in Florence, 2003

BA, Art History, Dartmouth College, 1998