Lyle Massey

Picture of Lyle Massey
Associate Professor, Art History
School of Humanities
Ph.D., UCLA, 1995, Art History
Fax: (949) 824-2464
Email: lmassey@uci.edu
University of California, Irvine
Department of Art History
2116 Humanities Gateway
Mail Code: 2785
Irvine, CA 92697
Research Interests
Renaissance and early modern art history, art and science, environmental humanities, medical humanities, gender studies
Appointments
2013-14 Frederick Burckhardt ACLS Residential Fellowship, Huntington Library
2000-2001 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship (NEH), Newberry Library, Chicago
Awards and Honors
William Nelson Prize for best article (Renaissance Society of America) 1997
Publications
BOOKS
Co-editor with James Nisbet, The Invention of the American Desert: Structure, Art, Ecology, and Land (University of California Press, 2021)

Picturing Space, Displacing Bodies: Anamorphosis in Early Modern Theories of Perspective (Penn State University Press, 2007)

Editor, The Treatise on Perspective: Published and Unpublished, Studies in the History of Art Series, Vol. 59 (National Gallery Publications/Yale U. Press, 2003).
ARTICLES AND BOOK CHAPTERS
“Ascetic Ecology: Landscape of a Desert Saint,” in Bronwen Wilson and Angela Vanhaelen, eds., Making Worlds (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2022): 301-331.

Co-author with James Nisbet, “Introduction” The Invention of the American Desert: Structure, Art, Ecology, and Land, eds. Lyle Massey and James Nisbet (University of California Press, 2021): 1-18.

“Troglodyte Modernists,” The Invention of the American Desert: Structure, Art, Ecology, and Land, eds. Lyle Massey and James Nisbet (University of California Press, 2021): 79-99.

“Thaumaturgic Visions: Andrea Pozzo’s St. Ignatius Corridor,” Word and Image, Vol. 37, no. 3 (December 2021): 229-244.

“Against the ‘statue anatomized’: the ‘art’ of eighteenth-century anatomy on trial” Art History, 40:1 (February 2017): 68-103

“I won’t dance, don’t ask me…The 50th Anniversary of Yvonne Rainer’s Trio A” Los Angeles Review of Books, September 21, 2016. https://avidly.lareviewofbooks.org/2016/09/21/i-wont-dance-dont-ask-me/

“The Alchemical Womb: Johann Remmelin’s Catoptrum Microcosmicum” in Sean Roberts and Tim McCall, eds. The Visual Culture of Secrecy in Early Modern Europe (Truman State University Press, 2013): 208-228.

“Reflections on Temporality in Dutch Art,” Art History, 35:5 (December 2012): 1050-57
Reprinted in The Erotics of Looking: Early Modern Netherlandish Art, eds. Angela Vanhaelen and Bronwen Wilson (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013): 184-191.

“On Waxes and Wombs,” in Roberta Panzanelli, ed., Waxing Bodies: Wax Reproductions of Bodies and Body Parts, (Publications of the Getty Research Institute, forthcoming, 2008).

“Framing and Mirroring the World,” in John Jeffries Martin, ed. The Renaissance World (Routledge, 2007): 51-68.

“The Anatomy of Gender,” introductory catalogue essay, The Anatomy of Gender exhibition at the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, Jan. 3-Mar. 12, 2006

“Dissecting Pregnancy in 18th-century England,” essay for The Anatomy of Gender exhibition website, Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, Jan. 3-Mar. 12, 2006 http://anatomyofgender.northwestern.edu

“Pregnancy and Pathology: Picturing Childbirth in eighteenth-Century Obstetric Atlases,” The Art Bulletin, vol. 87, no. 1 (March 2005): 73-91.

“Introduction” and “Configuring Spatial Ambiguity: Tracing the Evolution of the Distance Point from Alberti to Anamorphosis,” in Lyle Massey, ed., The Treatise on Perspective: Published and Unpublished, Studies in the History of Art Series, Vol. 59 (National Gallery Publications/Yale U. Press, 2003): 9-19 and 160-175.

Review of J.V. Field The Invention of Infinity (Oxford U. Press, 1997) in The Art Bulletin, Vol. 83, no. 3 (September 2001): 564-566.

"Anamorphosis through Descartes or Perspective Gone Awry," Renaissance Quarterly 50.4 (December, 1997): 1148-1189. Awarded the William Nelson Prize, Best Article, 1997, by the Renaissance Society of America.
Grants
2021-22 University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI) Multicampus Faculty Working Group, On the Sea and Coastal Ecologies: Early Modern Pasts and Uncertain Futures, 2020-21, primary co-investigator with Tiffany Jo Werth (UC Davis) and Bronwen Wilson (UCLA)
2016, Conference grant (with James Nisbet) for "The Fabricated American Desert: Modern and Anti-modern," from the Huntington Museum and Library, San Marino, CA
2014, Research grant (with James Nisbet) from University of California Institute for Research in the Arts (UCIRA), for UCI Art/Landscape/Environment research cluster
2010 Computing and Libraries (CORCL), travel and research grant, University of California, Irvine
Last updated
07/11/2023