Fellowship / Fellows

Mitchell B. Merback

  • 2007–2008
  • Humanities
  • DePauw University
Headshot of Mitchell B. Merback
Photo by Tony Rinaldo

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Fusing art history and historical anthropology, Mitchell B. Merback, an associate professor of art history at DePauw University, examines a wide range of issues concerning the devotional and cultic arts of the Christian Late Middle Ages and Renaissance. He recently completed a book project, “Pilgrimage and Pogrom: Anti-Jewish Myth, Violence, and Visual Culture in Late Medieval Germany and Austria.”

As a Radcliffe fellow, Merback will pursue work on “The Radical German Renaissance: Art, Dissent, and Religious Regime in the Era of Reform, 1475–1550,” which explores the radicalization of German and Swiss Renaissance artists in response to the social, economic, and ideological changes brought on by the Protestant Reformation, iconoclasm, and the Peasants’ War of 1525. Focusing on the early struggle to define the character of the Reformation, the study traces the careers of painters and printmakers who redefined their social position and their art and, true to Renaissance norms, projected a distinctive artistic identity within the public sphere.

Merback received his PhD in the history of art from the University of Chicago in 1995. He is the author of the award-winning book The Thief, the Cross and the Wheel: Pain and the Spectacle of Punishment in Medieval and Renaissance Europe (University of Chicago Press, 1999) and editor of Beyond the Yellow Badge: Anti-Judaism and Antisemitism in Medieval and Early Modern Visual Culture (Brill Publishers, forthcoming in 2007). In 2005, he received the College Art Association's Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize for an outstanding article in the Art Bulletin.

Our 2023–2024 Fellows

01 / 09

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