Samantha Leanne Smith

Position

Assistant Professor

Affiliation

Research groups

Short info

Teaching in antique visual culture, architecture 1750-1950, and early modern art and the achieropoeita.
Current projects include the relationship between art and relics, the theme of the imprint in art from antiquity to contemporary art and art's history in the work of Bente Sætrang.
Research

Art and visual culture in early modern Europe

Art theory.

Blindness as a metaphor

Early modern antiquarianism and the origins of modern archaeology and history. 

Early history of the botanical garden.

Images as a universal language.

Image science

Labels and labelling of museum and art objects.

Origins of the museum.

Reformation.

Relics.

Representations of blindness in art and literature.

Scientific illustration 

Visual Culture

Veneration of images

 

Outreach

2024

December, 2024: 'Christmas through the eyes of artists' Guest lecture for Senioruniversitetet, kvam. Kabuso, Øystese.

2023

March, 2023: 'Harriet Backer' Artist biography for AWARE webpage on women artists and curators. https://awarewomenartists.com/en/artiste/harriet-backer/

March. 2023: Art historical society's annual meeting 2023, Oslo : PhD evening. Project presentation:  'Translating the Image'.

2019

Nov. 2019: Den Store Norske Leksikon : bidrag om 'Likkledet i Torino'.

3. oktober 2019: Forelesning for Estetiske lesesirkel ved UiB, 'Index of an Absent Wound' - A seminar on Georges Didi-Huberman's theories on visuality. 

2018

September, 2018: The Norwegian Insitute in Rome, Rome: 'The Shroud and the Pineapple: The use of images in sixteenth-century Bologna'

2017

4th October, 2017: Guest Lecture at the University of Oslo: 'Defining an Image and Creating a cultural- historical lens: Paleotti and W. J. T Mitchell'

 

Teaching

I have taught on a number of Art History courses at UiB including:

  • KUN 105 - Art and Culture in Antiquity, Byzantium, and the Early Middle Ages
  • KUN 106 - Art, Architecture and Visual Culture 1750-1950
  • KUN 107 - Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque Art and Culture
  • KUN 108 - Art, Architecture and Visual Culture 1950-today
  • KUN 201 - Art Theory, Aesthetics and Historiography. (Course responsible)
  • KUN 209 - Art, Rhetoric and Traditions of Learning in the Pre- and Early Modern Period.
  • KUN 321 - Research Mediation: Art History in Society Community (Course responsible)
Publications
2022
2021
2016
2015

See a complete overview of publications in Cristin.

Publications

Material Cultures of Devotion in the Age of the Reformations. Co-edited with L. K. Skinnebach and S. Ryan. 

'Chastising the Eye in the 'Golden Age'. The image of blind Tobit in seventeenth-century Netherlands.' In Material Cultures of Devotion in the Age of the Reformations. Eds. L. K. Skinnebach, S. Ryan and S. L. Smith (Peeters, 2021).

Encyclopaedia Contributions

'Likkleddet i Torino' Store Norske Leksikon. (2019)

Master's Thesis

Painting Blindness and Obscuring Vision: Rembrandt and the senses’. 2014, (MA Thesis)