Professor of Art History Julia DeLancey
On Saturday, October 19, Julia DeLancey (Professor of Art History) presented a paper entitled “The Visual Culture of the Confraternity of the Blind in Early Modern Venice” at the 50th meeting of the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference. The paper, based on new archival research in the Archivio di Stato (state archives) in Venice, explored the activities of a group (confraternity) formed in the fourteenth century so that Venetians with visual impairments could ask for alms in the lagoon city. The paper also relied on key ideas from disability studies theory, in particular the cultural model of disability laid out by Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell (Georgetown University) who spoke on UMW’s campus in the fall of 2018.