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Tamara Golan studies and teaches medieval and early modern art in northern Europe, specializing in visual material culture in Switzerland and southern Germany. Her research interests intersect art, science, and law, focusing on paradigms of expertise, artistic fraud, and the materiality of art. Currently, she is working on a book that investigates the role of legal definitions as evidence in the development of pictorial naturalism in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Swiss art. This project explores how artists in the region responded to a growing desire to test and verify the sacred through forensic examination of the natural world, highlighting a complex relationship between human artifice and evidentiary status in the eve of the Reformation. Golan's broader research provides an alternative history of naturalistic painting, intertwining representation with legal concerns. Her projects also include studies on the relationship between juridical discourse and the political lives of reliquaries and the artistic legacy of late medieval artists in East Germany. Golan received her Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University and her M.A. from Tufts University. She has held fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, and the Max-Planck Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence.
Department of Philosophy