About

Katherine Tycz is a historian of early modern Italian material culture. She draws from an interdisciplinary approach exploring the intersections of literary history, material culture, social history, and art history. Her analysis of art, objects, and texts helps to illuminate the practices, beliefs, and daily life of people in early modern Italy. Her current research considers early modern Italian devotion and material culture, with a focus on material text. She is currently an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow in Italian at the University of Galway, and is based in the Moore Institute for Research in the Humanities and Social Studies and is affiliated with the Centre for the Study of Religion. 

She completed a Ph.D. in Italian at the University of Cambridge.  During her time at Cambridge, she was PhD student on the interdisciplinary research project, Domestic Devotions: The Place of Piety in the Italian Renaissance Home, 1400-1600. The project, which was funded by a European Research Council Synergy Grant, was led by Principal Investigators Abigail Brundin, Deborah Howard, and Mary Laven.

From 2018-2019, Katherine was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities in the Wolf Humanities Center at the University of Pennsylvania, where she was a participant in the forum on “Stuff”.

She has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Cambridge, the Rhode Island School of Design, and the Bard Graduate Center. She has worked in curatorial research positions in museums in both the U.S. and U.K.