New faculty: Leslie Geddes, Visiting Assistant Professor, Art History

The Newcomb Art Department welcomes Leslie Geddes to the faculty as Visiting Assistant Professor. Leslie Geddes specializes in Italian Renaissance and Baroque art and architecture. She received her Ph.D. in the history of art from Princeton University in 2014. Her research has been supported by a grant from the Kluge Foundation, a Donald and Mary Hyde Fellowship, and a Readership in Renaissance Studies at Harvard University’s Villa I Tatti in Florence.

Prof. Geddes’s research focuses on how early modern architects and engineers studied and depicted the natural landscape, specifically attending to the use of drawing in the production of knowledge. Her first book project, Watermarks: Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance Mastery of Nature, analyzes the subject of water in art in conjunction with the practical undertakings of hydraulic engineering. She has recently published two articles, one on Leonardo’s geological studies and another on his drawings of mobile bridges, an ancient military technology. She is also writing an article on Renaissance descriptions of experiments that agitate natural phenomena, such as boiling water or lighting fires.

Prior to coming to Tulane, she was a curatorial research assistant at the Morgan Library & Museum and a bibliographer for the Metropolitan Museum of Art.