Sarah Wilkins is a specialist in Late Medieval and Renaissance art history. Her scholarship focuses on patronage, the cult of the saints, and representations of women in Late Medieval Italy.
Dr Wilkins has received numerous awards for her work, including a RSA-Samuel H. Kress Research Fellowship in Renaissance Art (2020), a Fulbright fellowship and a Mellon dissertation finishing grant. She has presented papers at many conferences, most recently at the Renaissance Society of America (2025). She is also an organizer of the biennial Ladis Memorial Trecento Conference, which will be held in October 2025 in Athens, Georgia.
She has two forthcoming articles, the first “Late Medieval
Vita Panels and Mary Magdalen as a Gendered Model of Penitence,” will be published in 2025 in
Women and Gender in Trecento Art & Architecture: Images, Ideals, Realities, edited by Judith Steinhoff. The second, “Mary Magdalen in the ‘Wilderness’ of Provence,” will be published in
Environmental Narratives and the Eremitic Turn, a special issue of
Different Visions, edited by Denva Gallant and Amelie Hope-Jones (forthcoming 2025).
She is currently working on her book exploring the usage of the chapel in the Bargello of Florence over time, titled Creation, Transformation, Loss, and Rediscovery: The Magdalen Chapel in the Palazzo del Podestà, Florence, 1320-1840, and in Fall 2025 will be on sabbatical.
PhD, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
MS, Pratt Institute
BA, Vanderbilt University
Books:
Co-editor with Holly Flora, Trecento Forum I: Art and Experience in Trecento Italy, Proceedings from the Andrew Ladis Memorial Conference, New Orleans, 2016. Turnhout: Brepols, 2019.
Selected Articles:
Co-author with Corinna Gallori, “Mendicant Orders and Late Medieval Art Patronage,” in Oxford Bibliographies in Medieval Studies, edited by Paul E. Szarmach. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022: http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com
“Countenances as Lightning: The Materiality of the Noli me tangere Fresco in Assisi,” in Convivium 5, no. 2 (2018): 82–97.
“Adopting and adapting Formulas: The Raising of Lazarus and Noli me tangere in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua and the Magdalen Chapel in Assisi,” in La Formule au Moyen Âge, edited by Elise Louviot, 251–271, ARTEM 15. Turnhout: Brepols, 2013.
“Imaging the Angevin Patron Saint: Mary Magdalen in the Pipino Chapel in Naples,” in California Italian Studies 3, no. 1 (2012). Available at http://escholarship.org/uc/item/7pz6w018
