OLLI at Auburn instructor receives more than $400,000 in grants from National Endowment for the Humanities, Richard Lounsbery Foundation

Local art historian Anne Leader, a non-resident Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) at the University of Virginia, was awarded a 2024 Humanities Collections and Reference Resources grant (HCRR) from the Division of Preservation and Access of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).

The award supports the project “Florence Illuminated: Visualizing the History of Art, Architecture and Society,” which she co-directs with Niall Atkinson, an associate professor of art history and medieval and Renaissance architecture and urban history at the University of Chicago. This is Leader’s second HCRR grant, the first coming in 2021 to develop her ongoing project “Digital Sepoltuario,” an interactive website on the connections between burial choices, family networks and religious and social affiliations in Florence, Italy. She presented this project as part of the Brown Bag Lecture Series at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) at Auburn University, during which she discussed how she connected city and church burial records to the commemorative landscape of premodern Florence.

Leader will return to OLLI this year to teach a course on the history of Western art. Leader will also present “How Will They Remember Me? Tomb Reuse in Renaissance Florence” during the upcoming OLLI Brown Bag Series on Wednesday, Jan. 29, at 11:30 a.m. at Pebble Hill in Auburn. The talk is free and open to the public.

Administered through the University of Chicago, the new two-year HCRR grant will support a partnership of five digital humanities projects as they develop a proof of concept to link independently developed datasets and websites through a single online portal. Atkinson leads the project “Communities, Architecture and Technology Aligning in Space and Time Online” (CATASTO) with Carmen Caswell, senior research analyst in UChicago’s Forum for Digital Culture.

In collaboration with Caswell and Florence-based archival consultant Francesco Bettarini, Atkinson has been developing a data-rich digital map of the remarkable urban society of Renaissance Florence in 1427, the historical moment in which it was producing some of Europe’s most important artistic and architectural monuments by artists such as Filippo Brunelleschi, Lorenzo Ghiberti and Masaccio, with data extracted from an extraordinary property census, or catasto, compiled as part of a new taxation system inaugurated in that year. Atkinson will manage the grant through UChicago’s Forum for Digital Culture, home to the Online Cultural and Historical Research Environment (OCHRE), led by Sandra Schloen, director of technology for the Forum. As a research consultant to the University of Chicago, Lorenzo Vigotti of the Università di Bologna leads the project “Pupili–Domestic Inventories of Early Modern Florence,” which catalogs and analyzes more than 3,000 household inventories drawn up in the 14th and 15th centuries that correspond to properties described in the catasto.

Sub-awards will go to the University of Virginia, where Leader has developed “Digital Sepoltuario”, an online catalog of tombs, chapels and other Florentine memorials through IATH; Washington and Lee University, home to “Florence As It Was,” a student-centered 3D reconstruction of Renaissance Florence directed by Sidney Gause Childress Professor of the Arts George Bent through the Integrative and Quantitative (IQ) Center in collaboration with David M. Pfaff, senior academic technologist and director of the IQ Center, and Mackenzie Brooks, associate professor and digital humanities librarian; and Indiana University, where historian Peter Sposato is principal investigator for the “Militia and Florentine Books of the Dead” projects. The former, supported with NEH funds, traces military service and officeholding among disenfranchised Florentine families in the 14th and 15th centuries. The latter, to which the Richard Lounsbery Foundation has given $70,000, makes machine readable the wealth of demographic data found in the Libri dei Morti (Books of the Dead) kept by Florentine officials from 1385 through 1779.

NEH funding will allow the research team to develop a platform for integrating their complementary data by focusing on a single Florentine parish church (San Remigio). The final product, a freely available, fully searchable website, will allow students, scholars, genealogists and visitors to Florence, whether in person or virtually, to explore and interpret this treasured UNESCO heritage site on an unprecedented scale.

“We have been talking about sharing our data for years, and we are thrilled to have finally made some real progress, thanks to such generous funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Lounsbery Foundation,” Leader said.

The Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) at Auburn University is a program within the Division of University Outreach. Its mission is to enrich the lives of adults by providing opportunities to engage with ideas, one another and our community through member-centered courses, hands-on learning experiences and social interaction for people over 50. Each year, the OLLI Brown Bag Series hosts free, public lectures from experts in a variety of subjects. To learn more, visit OLLI’s website.