Renata Nagy

Renata Nagy works across the fields of the history of art and science, book history, and material culture studies in early modern northern Europe. Her dissertation examines the reception of natural history text and illustrations in the seventeenth century through material practices—such as pasting—happening in the book. She considers individual interaction with the book on the part of a wide range of individuals—from scholars to artists and amateurs—as a departure point to ask questions about natural history as a global and colonial enterprise.

Renata is a co-curator of the exhibition "Thinking Small: Dutch Art to Scale" (Yale University Art Gallery and Boston Museum of Fine Arts, 2023). The show explores a range of Dutch works across media in the seventeenth century that were designed to encourage intimate interaction and sustained looking from their original viewers. She has also curated the online exhibition "Natural Interactions in the Book as Art and Making Knowledge" (Medical Historical Library at Yale, 2022). The exhibition showcases how early modern natural history books were both works of art and active sites of knowledge production about nature shaped by a variety of hands.
Renata's work has been supported by the Paul Mellon Centre in London, The Huntington Library, the University of Oxford, and the MacMillan Center, among others.

For more on Renata's projects, presentations, and publications, please refer to her website.