Elizabeth Athens

Early Modern Anatomies and the Arboreal Body

Centered on sixteenth-century anatomical prints, this project examines the material alignment of woodcut with human dissection. Just as dissection was the excavation of the body’s networks of veins and nerves, the woodcut was the freeing of a design from a biological substrate to make it visible and intelligible. The period’s refinement of woodcut did not just convey new concepts in anatomical thought but laid the groundwork for these discoveries. Research for this project will form the analytical framework of my book Material Matrix: Print Media and Scientific Visualization, which examines inflection points in the histories of science and print technology.

Elizabeth Athens is an art historian at the University of Connecticut with research interests in the connections between art and science, the art of empire, and the history of collecting. Before coming to UConn she worked at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts in Washington, DC, contributing to the digital humanities resource History of Early American Landscape Design, and served as the curator of American art at the Worcester Art Museum. While at Worcester she reinterpreted the museum’s portrait galleries to draw attention to the practice of slavery in New England, a project that garnered national and international recognition. She also organized the traveling exhibition Coming Away: Winslow Homer and England and co-authored its catalogue. Athens’s most recent publication, William Bartram’s Visual Wonders (University of Pittsburgh Press), examines the graphic practice of this eighteenth-century artist and naturalist. Her research has been published in The Oxford Art Journal, History of Photography, and J18: A Journal of Eighteenth-Century Art and Culture.