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.