John Decker
Chairperson of History of Art and Design History of Art and Design jdecker@pratt.edu 718.636.3598 p Brooklyn Campus, East Hall 2
Personal URL
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8648-1455
Education
PhD -- University of California, Santa Barbara
MA -- University of California, Santa Barbara
BA -- California State University, Stanislaus
Biography
My approach to teaching and research are rooted in the concept of historical epistemology and are informed by the view that art history is a form of cultural/intellectual history. My scholarly interests include: scholastic theology, monasticism, religious self-fashioning, lay piety, religious and lay confraternities, ritual and spectacle, gender, and identity formation. I have published articles in venues such as Renaissance Quarterly, Sixteenth-Century Studies, and the Journal of the Historians of Netherlandish Art as well as book chapters in scholarly anthologies. I am the author of The Technology of Salvation and the Art of Geertgen tot Sint Jans (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009) and co-editor of Death, Torture, and the Broken Body in European Art, 1300-1650 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2015). My current scholarship explores the complex ways in which religious images, objects, and spaces worked to bring about particular types of awareness in early modern votaries.