Professor Costanza Dopfel Receives Second NEH Research Grant
She looks at Renaissance art and the impact that the Plague had in shaping it. In a time of COVID, the connections with the present also come into focus.
Costanza Dopfel, a professor in the Department of Modern Languages and chair of the Department of Art and Art History, has been awarded a $35,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). This honor is especially poignant because it marks the second time that she has received an NEH grant. The first was a summer grant last year for her research project “Fertile Florence. How a Demographic Disaster Shaped the Italian Renaissance,” and marked the first time in 25 years that the Summer NEH grant was awarded to a Saint Mary’s faculty member.
The new NEH grant, which is a fellowship through their Awards for Faculty program, was awarded to support Dopfel’s sabbatical research titled “The Impact of Plague Mortality and Demographic Depression on the Arts of Early Renaissance Florence.” Her research expands upon her examination of the epidemics following the 1348 Black Death, which repeatedly visited Europe throughout three centuries, and its impact and influence on Italian Renaissance art and literature. “What changed between the two research grants are the circumstances brought on by the COVID pandemic, something that has made my research even more tangible,” said Dopfel.
A Centuries-old Plague and a Modern Pandemic
The connections between the Plague in the 14th and 15th centuries and COVID-19, although separated by a vast difference in time, are not as far apart as they might seem at first. “The stress of the current global pandemic experience, which in some ways reminds us of the anxieties experienced by common men and women of the Renaissance, has brought plague-related scholarship to the forefront of the general public’s reading interest. The need to learn from the past may encourage a wide readership to discover through my work how humanity has coped with trauma by resorting to art and creativity.”
Dopfel, a Renaissance scholar, shared that the formation of her research originally developed from her teaching Renaissance art classes. “I saw that all of these images had become very common at a specific historical moment, and asked myself, what influenced this particular artistic production? And when I realized it was not coincidental that they were appearing at a time when the main concern was survival of the city through repopulation—because the plagues were arriving every 10 to 15 years and killing a large portion of the population, especially the children—it all clicked together.”
“The need to learn from the past may encourage a wide readership to discover through my work how humanity has coped with trauma by resorting to art and creativity.”
Sheila Hassel Hughes, dean of the School of Liberal Arts, extolled Dopfel’s important research, and its unique timeliness with the COVID-19 pandemic. “Professor Dopfel is a truly interdisciplinary scholar of Italian studies whose intense curiosity and passion has led her to ask fascinating questions about the impact of the plague upon maternal ideology and art in Renaissance Florence. Her project, though historical, couldn't be more timely, as we are all grappling today with the devastating toll of COVID-19. Costanza’s research can help inform our understanding of the long-term sociocultural effects of a pandemic,” said Hughes.
Dopfel is delighted to have been awarded a second NEH grant, with the latter being a more sizable award. “Between teaching and family responsibilities, it took me a long time to bring my research to fruition, which is why I’m so pleased to get this kind of external recognition,” said Dopfel. “It’s something that I have been working on for about 14 years, and that has been supported by Saint Mary’s through two sabbaticals, a Summer Research Grant, and now a Faculty Research Grant.”
Story formatting updated June 23, 2023.