Stephanie Porras is the recipient of the 2021 Publication Grant awarded by the Association of Print Scholars (APS in support of her forthcoming book, The First Viral Images: Maerten de Vos, Antwerp Print, and the Early Modern Globe.
The book, to be published by Penn State University Press, considers how a single engraving, the painting upon which it is based, and an illustrated book, traveled and functioned across the globe. Porras cites examples of the engraving's influence as a model for Spanish and American painters, Chinese printmakers, and Filipino ivory carvers. She proposes that, more than a story of migrant artists and objects, this book reconsiders the role of images in the uneven processes of globalization, beyond the transmission of artistic styles, ornament, or iconographic motifs. The publication aims to test art historical notions of copying and agency, context, and viewership.
Dr. Porras also received a grant from the College Art Association's Millard Meiss Publication Fund, which supports book-length scholarly manuscripts in the history of art, visual studies, and related subjects that have been accepted by a publisher on their merits, but cannot be published in the most desirable form without a subsidy.
Stephanie Porras is Associate Professor of Art History at Tulane University. She is the author of Pieter Bruegel’s Historical Imagination (2016), Art of the Northern Renaissance: Courts, Commerce and Devotion (2018) and co-editor of The Young Dürer: Drawing the Figure (2013). She currently serves as Reviews Editor for The Art Bulletin and is on the editorial board of the Nederlands Kunsthistorisches Jaarboek. Her forthcoming book, The First Viral Images: Maerten de Vos, Antwerp Print, and the Early Modern Globe, considers how a single engraving, the painting upon which it is based, and an illustrated book, circled the globe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
