Caitlin Petty

Caitlin Petty is a PhD Candidate who works on the visual and material culture of early modern Italy with Dr. William E. Wallace. Before joining the Art History and Archaeology Department at WashU, Caitlin received her BA in Art History at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in 2016 and completed her MA in Italian Renaissance Art through Syracuse University’s Florence Program in 2020. Her research interests include the intersection of art, medicine, and religion in the early modern period, images of the human body, funerary art and material culture, the history of collecting, and the relationship between art and atrocity. Caitlin’s Minor Field of Study focuses on art and the Holocaust, and she is part of a leadership team from Hobart and William Smith Colleges that travels with undergraduate students to Germany and Poland every two years for a Holocaust remembrance program entitled, The March: Bearing Witness to Hope. For the last six years, Caitlin has taught summer courses on Italian Renaissance art for Calder Classics in Tuscany. Her dissertation focuses on the complex set of relationships that existed between art, anatomy, and sanctity in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Florence.