Past lectures

Play-Making in Renaissance Florence

Professor Emerita Nerida Newbigin, University of Sydney

Watch a video recording of this lecture

2022, Melbourne


How to be a Renaissance Woman: Make up, Beauty and Dieting in Sixteenth-century Italy

Professor Jill Burke, Chair of Renaissance Visual and Material Cultures, University of Edinburgh

2019, Melbourne


The Sound of a Wall: Spatial and Sensory Boundaries between Christians, Jews, and Muslims in Renaissance and Early Modern Italy

Professor Nicholas Terpstra, University of Toronto

Watch a video recording of this lecture

2018, Melbourne


Coping with Plague: Public Health and Epidemics in Renaissance Italy

John Henderson, Professor of Italian Renaissance History in the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology, Birkbeck, University of London; Research Professor at Monash University, Melbourne; Fellow of Wolfson College, University of Cambridge

2017, Melbourne


Uses and Abuses of Intelligence from Dante to Machiavelli

Lino Pertile, Carl A. Pescosolido Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures, Harvard University, and former Paul E. Geier Director of Villa I Tatti, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies

Watch a video recording of this lecture

2016, Melbourne


Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel - 500 years

William E. Wallace, Barbara Murphy Bryant Distinguished Professor of Art History, Washington University in St Louis

Watch a video recording of this lecture

2014, Prato


Plague, Putrefaction and the Body of the Poor in Early Modern Europe

John Henderson, Professor of Italian Renaissance History, Department of History, Classics and Archaeology, Birkbeck, University of London, and Fellow of Wolfson College, University of Cambridge

2013, Prato


Machiavelli and the Renaissance

Professor John Najemy, Cornell University

2012, Melbourne - delivered as part of the ANZAMEMS 9th Biennial Conference hosted by Monash University


Learn My Language: Strategies of Medici Patronage in Renaissance Florence

John T. Paoletti, former Professor of Art History and the William R. Kenan Professor of the Humanities at Wesleyan University

2010, Melbourne - the inaugural lecture