THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
FIELD SPECIALTIES
Medieval Italian Architecture and Urbanism, Historical Soundscapes, Early Modern Travel in the Mediterranean, Digital Humanities and Historical Mapping, Environmental Histories of Early Modern Italy
BIOGRAPHY
Niall Atkinson is Associate Professor of Art History and Romance Languages and Literature at the University of Chicago. His research focuses on the experience of architecture and urban space in early modern Italy in order to understand the build environment as a collective social construction of the body’s sensorial apparatus. His recent work has explored the relationship between sound, space, and architecture and their role in the construction of civic society, culminating in the publication of The Noisy Renaissance: sound, architecture, and Florentine urban life (Penn State, 2016). He is currently co-writing a book on the urban visual and spatial effects of the narratives and itineraries of French travelers to early modern Rome (with Susanna Caviglia, Duke University). He is also experimenting with digital technologies to spatialize the demographic data contained in the 1427 tax census of Florence (catasto) into an interactive geographic platform. In collaboration with a consortium of related digital reconstruction projects focused on Renaissance Florence (Florentia Illustrata), this method of geo-referenced spatial history will lay the groundwork for future experiments in mapping the soundscapes and other sensory experiences of early modern cities. Future projects include the role of city descriptions in mediating cultural exchange in early modern Mediterranean travel accounts, as well as an ongoing interdisciplinary collaborative project exploring the cultural interactions of the Indian Ocean (“Interwoven: Sonic, visual and textual histories of the Indian Ocean world”). In 2018, he co-curated the US Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale on the theme, “Dimensions of Citizenship.”
Recent Research / Recent Publications
The Noisy Renaissance: Sound, Architecture, and Florentine Urban Life (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016), “Early Modern Rome on the Move: Ecological Contradictions in the Representation of a Reemerging City,” With Susanna Caviglia, RES 77-78 (2023)
“Neighborhood demographics at the Foundation of the Innocenti: a Test Case in Mapping the Florentine Catasto of 1427,” with Carmen Caswell, I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance (2023): 165-197
Florence, 1494: Politics in Motion in the Streets of Florence,” Journal of Early Modern History, 25, 1-2, (March 2021): 61-95
“Taking Architectural Theory on the Road: The Sliding Scales of the Florentine Traveler, in Florence in the Early Modern World: New Perspectives. Nicholas Baker and Brian J. Maxon, eds. Routledge, 2019
“Making Sense of Rome in the Eighteenth-Century: Walking and the French Aesthetic Imagination” (with Susanna Caviglia), Word and Image 34, no 3 (Sept 2018): 216-36.
“Getting Lost in the Italian Renaissance,” I Tatti Studies in the Renaissance 19, 1 (2016), 1-30
“Seeing Sound: Mapping the Florentine Soundscape,” Mapping Space, Sense, and Movement in Florence: Historical GIS and the Early Modem City, eds. Nicholas Terpstra, Colin Rose (Routledge, 2016), 149-68
“Thinking Through Noise, Building Toward Silence: Creating a Sound Mind and Sound Architecture in the Premodern City,” Grey Room 60 (2015): 10-35
Florentia Illustrata: Spatializing History and Visualizing Experience in the Renaissance City | Digital collaboration consortium (Villa I Tatti)
digital CATASTO: City, Architecture, & Technology Aligning in Space and Time Online | with Carmen Caswell (University of Chicago)
INTERWOVEN: Sonic & Visual Histories of the Indian Ocean | with Philip Bohlman, James Nye, Laura Ring, Anna Schultz, Anna Seastrand | Interwoven: Sonic & Visual Histories of the Indian Ocean
Sawyer Seminar, The Order of Multitudes: Atlas, Encyclopedia, Museum, Michael Faciejew, Katie Colored, Yale University, May 2022
“TO MAKE VISIBLE THE STRUCTURES”: CHALLENGING THE CANON, DIGITAL AND BEYOND, WITH NIALL ATKINSON AND MIN KYUNG LEE, In the Foreground; Conversations on Art & Writing, Clark Institut miniseries hosted by Caitlin Woolsey, February 2022.
Challenging-the-Canon “TO SEE THE EFFECTS OF SOUND”: NIALL ATKINSON ON ACOUSTIC TOPOGRAPHIES OF THE EARLY MODERN, In the Foreground; Conversations on Art & Writing, Clark Institut miniseries hosted by Caitlin Woolsey, November 2021.