Heather Graham
Heather Graham is an Associate Professor of Art History at California State University, Long Beach. Before coming to CSU, Long Beach she was an Assistant Professor of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at Metropolitan State University in Denver, Colorado. Her research and publications explore early modern Italian art as it intersects with the history of the body and of the emotions, early modern medicine, mourning behaviors and death, gender and sexual culture, and religion. She enjoys working with CSULB students and is especially committed to education abroad.
Dr. Graham is co-editor and contributing author for Visualizing Sensuous Suffering and Affective Pain in Early Modern Europe and the Spanish Americas (2018) and Art, Religion, and Emotions in the Transatlantic World, 1450-1800 (2021), both published through Brill’s Studies on Art, Art History and Intellectual History series. Her monograph, Bodies of Mourning: Grief, Maniera, and the History of Affect, c. 1520–1550 (in progress), considers sixteenth-century Italian images of biblical mourning over Christ in light of the history of gender, the body, and the emotions. She explores how the conspicuous artificiality and stylish fluidity characterizing mannerist depictions of grieving behaviors informed the works’ devotional and social functions.
She is Co-Director of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at CSU, Long Beach, and a founder of ArtsQ, an initiative supporting arts and humanities education in the K-12 classroom. She is a also former Contributing Editor for Renaissance Art in Central Italy for Smarthistory. She is the organizer of the CSULB Center for Medieval and Renaissance Study’s conference, Afterlives: Reinvention, Reception, Reproduction, held biennially at Forest Lawn Museum in Glendale, CA.
- PhD, University of California—Los Angeles, 2010
- MA, University of California—Los Angeles, 2004
- BA, Loyola Marymount University, 2000
"Representing Emotions" in The Oxford Handbook of The History of Emotions, eds., Katie Barclay and Sharon Crozier-De Rosa (Oxford: Oxford UP), forthcoming 2026.
Co-Editor, Emotions, Art, and Christianity in the Transatlantic World, c. 1400–1800 (Leiden: Brill, 2021).
“A Mother’s Wise and Prudent Grief: Reading Raphael’s Baglioni Entombment through the History of Emotions.” In Emotions, Art, and Christianity in the Transatlantic World, c. 1400–1800, edited by Heather Graham and Lauren Kilroy-Ewbank (Leiden: Brill, 2021).
Co-Editor, Visualizing Sensuous Suffering and Affective Pain in Early Modern Europe and the Spanish Americas (Leiden: Brill, 2018).
“Compassionate Suffering: Somatic Selfhood and Gendered Affect in Italian Lamentation Imagery.” In Visualizing Sensuous Suffering and Affective Pain in Early Modern Europe and the Spanish Americas, edited by Heather Graham and Lauren Kilroy-Ewbank, 82–115 (Leiden: Brill, 2018).
“Artifice and Interiority: The Image of Grief in the Age of Reform.” In Vanishing Boundaries: Scientific Knowledge and Art Production in the Early Modern Era, edited by A. Victor Coonin and Lilian H. Zirpolo, 25–50 (Ramsey, NJ: Women Art Patrons and Collectors Conference Organization, 2015).
Filippo Lippi's Madonna and Child with Two Angels: The Real and Ideal in Italian Renaissance
Defining a Genre Scene with Caravaggio
Equestrian Portrait of Marcus Aurelius
Simone Martini’s Angel: What is an angel?
Andrea Mantegna’s St. George: What is a halo?
Pisanello’s Portrait of Leonello d’Este: What is a Portrait Medal?
Sandro Botticelli’s Madonna of the Magnificat: What is a Tondo?
Raphael’s Lady with a Unicorn and Female Portraiture
Looking to Rome: What is an Oculus?
What is a Palazzo? Palazzo Rucellai
Defining the Annunciation with Leonardo da Vinci
Defining the Adoration of the Magi Gentile da Fabriano
Who was Lorenzo the Magnificent?
Defining Portraiture with Rogier van der Weyden
Defining the Self-Portraiture with Judith Leyster
What does a scepter symbolize?
Defining Still Life with Rachel Ruysch
What is Atmospheric Perspective?
Guido Mazzoni, Head of a Man [co-authored]
Palazzo Diamanti, Ferrara [co-authored]
Sala dei Mesi (Hall of the Months) at Palazzo Schifanoia
Titian, Isabella d’Este (Isabella in Black)
Cosmè Tura, Roverella Altarpiece
A primer for Italian Renaissance Art
The Italian Renaissance Court Artist
The Sala dei Mesi at Palazzo Schifanoia, Ferrara
Art in the Italian Renaissance Republics, c. 1400-1600, Ch. 47 in Reframing Art History, Digital Textbook (Smarthistory, 2022)
Art in Sovereign States of the Italian Renaissance, c. 1400-1600, Ch. 48 in Reframing Art History, Digital Textbook (Smarthistory, 2022)
A chapel for Eleonora di Toledo, Duchess of Florence
Humanism in Italian renaissance art
Alberti’s Revolution in Painting [co-authored]
Guido Mazzoni and Renaissance Emotions
Guido Mazzoni, Lamentation in Ferarra
Introduction to Gender in Renaissance Italy
Mannerism, An Introduction [co-authored]
Types of Renaissance Patronage
Why Commission Artwork During the Renaissance? [co-authored]