Who Are We?

Katharine Fellows.

I don’t have to look far for who’s responsible for my love of history: my secondary school history teacher whose charisma has rubbed off on generations of students. I probably should at this point mention, said teacher is also my Dad.

I came to Renaissance history after a trip to Venice with a friend from school. The visits to churches including the Frari and Santa Maria della Salute, the Doge's Palace and the Academia art gallery inspired me to apply to Warwick University which offered the chance to study in the city in the final year of study. Fast-forward several years and I was an undergraduate in Venice living in a small nay functional apartment near the Arsenale. In Venice we were taught by two experts (the late great Prof. Humfrey Butters and Dr. Jonathan Davies), they also led our trips to Mantua and the Palladian villas to name a couple. Along with my closest group of friends we travelled to Florence for a week, an experience I'll treasure for a lifetime. But all good things sadly come to an end. Following my BA at Warwick, where I wrote my dissertation not on the Renaissance but the 1569 Northern Rising under Elizabeth I, I moved to Durham for my MA in Medieval History. In attempt to understand the Renaissance more, I shifted my focus to the 12th and 13th centuries with my dissertation examining the linguistics of the Cathars of Languedoc. Finally in 2014 I returned to the Renaissance when I began my doctoral thesis on Rodrigo Borgia's (later Pope Alexander VI) tenure as papal vice-chancellor under the supervision of Professor Nicholas Davidson and Dr Stella Fletcher. I've published on diabolic depictions of Pope Alexander VI and have a forthcoming book chapter on violence during sede vacante.

Barry Torch:

Driven to study history by several prongs of interest (the many coffee table history books I read as a child, video games and their associated encyclopedias, and some fantastic family museum trips), I completed my Bachelors of Arts in both History and Philosophy as a joint degree at Wilfrid Laurier University in 2012, studying with Dr. Chris Nighman, Dr. David Smith, Dr. Jason Sager, Dr. Kathy Behrendt, and Dr. Rebekah Johnson (among many others). While there, I did a summer-abroad study trip of 1300s Italian art through the University of Toronto, studying with the late Dr. Jens Wollesen. Fully being immersed in the amazing art of the period, in its original-ish context, really made me realize how much I wanted to study History - particularly the history of Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy.

My graduate work placed me squarely into Renaissance Rome! My Masters work at York University with Dr. Thomas Cohen focused on the Commentaries of Pope Pius II and its political/literary engagement, and my doctoral work (still with Dr. Cohen at York) expanded to study the social and cultural worlds of Renaissance Humanism in mid-fifteenth century Rome. I am currently finishing up a dissertation on the cultural behaviour and worlds of scholars in Rome, teaching part time, and always working on my ability to read and work with Latin.