Professor Deborah Howard
- Professor Emerita of Architectural History (No longer accepting new graduate students from September 2017)
- Fellow of St John's College
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About
Deborah Howard is Professor Emerita of Architectural History in the Faculty of Architecture and History of Art, and a Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge. She was Head of Department of History of Art from 2002-9 (with a sabbatical break in the middle). A graduate of Cambridge and of the Courtauld Institute of Art, she taught at University College London, Edinburgh University and the Courtauld Institute, before returning to Cambridge in 1992.
She has held visiting appointments at Yale (summer Term program in London), Harvard (Aga Khan program and the Villa I Tatti), the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, Smith College, Princeton, and the Universities of Melbourne and Queensland.
From 2005 until 2013 she led the Centre for Acoustic and Musical Experiments in Renaissance Architecture (CAMERA) in the Department of History of Art, University of Cambridge.
She was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2010.
Her principal research interests are the art and architecture of Venice and the Veneto; music and architecture in the Renaissance; and the relationship between Italy and the Eastern Mediterranean.
With Dr Mary Laven (History) and Dr Abigail Brundin (Italian) she co-ordinated a major ERC Synergy Grant entitled ‘Domestic Devotions: The Place of Piety in the Italian Home’ (2013-2017).
Her recent Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowship resulted in the book Proto-Industrial Architecture in the Veneto in the Age of Palladio (2021, also published in Italian) and the subsequent exhibition Acqua, Terra, Fuoco at the Palladio Museum in Vicenza (2022-23). This project received a Europa Nostra European Heritage award.
Her latest books are:
Sound and Space in Renaissance Venice: Architecture, Music, Acoustics (with Laura Moretti), Yale University Press 2009
Venice Disputed: Marc’Antonio Barbaro and Venetian Architecture 1550-1600, Yale University Press 2011
The Music Room in Early Modern France and Italy: Sound, Space and Object (Proceedings of the British Academy 176), edited with Laura Moretti, Oxford University Press, 2012.
Architecture and Pilgrimage: Southern Europe and Beyond (edited with Paul Davies and Wendy Pullan), Ashgate, 2013
The Image of Venice: Fialetti’s View and Sir Henry Wotton (edited with Henrietta McBurney), Paul Holberton, 2014
Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari: Devotional Spaces, Images of Piety (edited with Carlo Corsato), Padova: Centro Studi Antoniani 2015
Madonnas and Miracles: The Holy Home in Renaissance Italy (edited with Maya Corry and Mary Laven), exhibition catalogue, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, Philip Wilson 2017
The Sacred Home in Renaissance Italy (with Abigail Brundin and Mary Laven), Oxford University Press, 2018