Marie-Louise Lillywhite

Marie-Louise is the senior tutor of the Middlebury-CMRS Oxford Humanities program, as well as a research associate at Keble College and a member of the History Faculty at Oxford. Prior to taking up this role, Marie-Louise taught at the History of Art department at the University of Warwick, where she convened the History of Art MA in Venice, a city in which she lived for many years.

For the Middlebury program in Oxford Marie-Louise teaches courses on Art and Censorship (1500-1650) and Art and Religion on the Global Jesuit Missions (1540-1773). Both of these seminars are based around her research interests in global Renaissance and Baroque visual culture. Marie-Louise has published on topics that include aspects of confraternal artistic patronage in early-modern Italy, the role of women and daughters in forming alliances between workshops, the limits of artistic liberty in post-Tridentine Venice, and twentieth-century garden design in Sri Lanka. At the moment she is putting the finishing touches to a book called Reforming Art in Renaissance Venice, to be published by Cambridge University Press next year. This explores how artists articulated belief in the decades following the Reformations, at a time when the significance and power of the sacred image was highly contested by Protestants and Catholics.