Research Interests

Renowned for her revisionist publications on art and gender in the early modern Low Countries, Andrea Pearson pursues projects that rewrite the art-historical record on social marginalization, including on sexual desire and physical disability. These works are united by their varied modes of understanding visualization — the formation and interpretation of images — as a fundamental, and culturally variable, human endeavor.

Institutional Affiliations, Publications, and Service

Dr. Andrea Pearson is professor emerita of Art History and a former chair of the Department of Art at American University in Washington, D.C. She specializes in the visual culture of late medieval and early modern northern Europe, with a research program focused on gender, sex, and the history of the body in the southern Low Countries and Germany. Her latest book, Gardens of Love and the Limits of Morality in Early Netherlandish Art, was published by Brill in 2019. She is the author of Envisioning Gender in Burgundian Devotional Art, 1350-1530: Experience, Authority, Resistance (Ashgate, 2005), which was awarded Honorable Mention for Best First Book by the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship, and editor of Women and Portraits in Early Modern Europe: Gender, Agency, Identity (Ashgate, 2008). Dr. Pearson has contributed articles to Art History, Gesta, the Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art, and Renaissance Quarterly among others, and to a number of anthologies. Her current book projects investigate, in one instance, the enigmatic “Medieval Housebook” from the perspectives of gender, sex, and virtue ethics, and, in another, the importance of women’s spiritual cultures to the canonical Ghent Altarpiece. She is co-editor with Marilyn Dunn of the book series “Illuminating Women Artists: Renaissance and Baroque,” published by The Getty and Lund Humphries. She has served on boards such as the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women, of which she is President for 2023-24; Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal; and the Sixteenth Century Society.

Previously Dr. Pearson held a full professorship at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania, where in 2001 she received the annual award for distinguished teaching on the undergraduate and graduate levels.

Contact: pearson@american.edu

Art History Program, American University: http://www.american.edu/cas/art-history/index.cfm