Dr. Laura Overpelt

As of January 1, 2024, I fill the position of Director of Art History at the KNIR. I am affiliated with Utrecht University as Assistant Professor of Early Modern Art History (1400-1800). I completed my Bachelor’s and Research Masters’s (with honors) degree in History of the Visual Arts (300-1800) at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. In 2022, I earned my doctoral degree from the Open Universiteit (Heerlen, The Netherlands) with a thesis titled “By a Single Painter”: The Organization and Representation of Giorgio Vasari’s Decorative Projects in the Palazzo Vecchio. This research project was funded through the PhD’s in Humanities-program by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). It investigates the discrepancy between Giorgio Vasari’s (1511-1574) workshop practice and its portrayal in written and visual sources from an art and cultural historical perspective. During this project, I spent several extended periods at the Dutch research institutes in Florence and Rome. Furthermore, I delivered several papers at national and international conferences and held a fellowship at the Medici Archive Project in Florence, Italy, where I resided between 2017 and 2022. In past years, I was a lecturer in art history at the Open Universiteit and Utrecht University. In addition to teaching courses and supervising and facilitating individual students and scholars, in my position as Director of Studies in Art History and Cultural Sciences at the KNIR, I will focus on a new research project in the history of art from a socio-cultural, transnational, and transhistorical perspective, with particular emphasis on Rome as the ‘school of the world’. Thus, I will explore intentional and incidental exchanges within or stemming from Rome between individuals, crafts, and cultures within the creative industry and the resulting impacts on a.o. style, technique, materials, and educational and workshop methods.