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Faculty Fellow

Niall Atkinson

Associate Professor of Art History, Romance Languages and Literature, and the College University of Chicago

Biography

Photo by Erielle Bakkum

Niall Atkinson’s teaching and scholarship focus on public space, urban history, soundscapes, geography and travel as well as the architecture and urbanism of late Medieval and Renaissance Italy. His research has concerned the relationship between sound, space, and architecture and their role in the construction of pre-modern urban societies. His current projects explore digital visualizations of early modern urban soundscapes through GIS technology, as well as the visual and sonic cultures of the Indian Ocean. He is also currently collaborating on a new book project with Susanna Caviglia (Duke University) that is tentatively entitled Wandering in Rome: French Travelers and the Image of the Early Modern City, which investigates the aesthetics and the mechanics of urban mobility that constituted the experience and representation of Rome for Early Modern French travelers.

Featured Project

The Changing Social and Rhetorical Foundations of Florentine Republicanism

2014 – 2018

Projects

Interwoven: Sonic and Visual Histories of the Indian Ocean World

Interwoven: Sonic and Visual Histories of the Indian Ocean World

This project explored the historical significance of South Asian artistic practices and the complex ways they helped shape local and transregional cultures.
Interwoven lays the foundations of a new paradigm for understanding movement, practice, materiality, and embodiment as constituting factors of social relations across long temporal arcs and geographic itineraries unbounded by national borders in the Indian Ocean region. The project builds upon and ...

Visualizing the Changing Spatial and Social Ecology of Renaissance Florence

Visualizing the Changing Spatial and Social Ecology of Renaissance Florence

A time-series of urban mapping documented the changing spatial, social, and economic ecology of Florence in the Renaissance period.
Based on coding household-level residential data in the 1427 and the 1480 (or perhaps 1495) tax censuses (catasti) of Renaissance Florence, this project proposed to develop a time-series of urban maps, which documented the changing spatial, social, and economic ecology of that city over one hundred ...

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