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Dr. Kendra Grimmett is an art historian of early modern Europe (1300-1700), who specializes in the material culture and social history of Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands. She earned degrees in art history from the University of Pennsylvania (PhD), the University of Texas at Austin (MA), and the University of Chicago (BA). In her scholarship and in her classroom, Dr. Grimmett foregrounds the reception of art objects by patrons, collectors, and early modern audiences. She teaches courses on Baroque, Renaissance, and medieval art history, art historical methods, and introductory global surveys of art history.

Dr. Grimmett’s research, which has been generously funded by a Rubenianum-Belgian American Educational Foundation (B.A.E.F.) Fellowship and an Andrew W. Mellon Graduate Fellowship at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, examines depictions of the human body across media and geographies. Her publications on the paintings of Peter Paul Rubens offer a cultural and historical study of seventeenth-century gender norms in the Low Countries. She is currently preparing articles that interrogate men and women’s roles in marriage, the fashioning of masculine identity, and early modern sexuality in Rubens’s Hercules and Omphale (c. 1605-1607, Louvre, Paris) and in the artist’s self-portrait with his wife Isabella Brant (The Honeysuckle Bower, c. 1609, Alte Pinakothek, Munich).

Recent Publications

“The Images and Interventions of Adriana Perez in the Rockox Collection.” In “Female Roles in Art and Society of the Netherlands, 1500-1950,” edited by Elizabeth Honig, Judith Noorman, and Thijs Weststeijn, Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art / Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 74 (2024). https://brill.com/edcollbook/title/71009.

“The Body of Christ and the Embodied Viewer in Rubens’s Rockox Epitaph.” In “Affective Art,” edited by Marcia B. Hall, special issue, Arts 12, no. 6: 251 (2023).https://doi.org/10.3390/arts12060251.

“Stumbling along the Virtuous Path with Rubens’s Drunken Hercules.” In “Deugd en ondeugd. Morele scherpslijperij in de zeventiende-eeuwse Nederlanden,” edited by Carolina Lenarduzzi and Gerrit Verhoeven, Jaarboek de Zeventiende Eeuw, Cultuur in de Nederlanden in interdisciplinair perspectief (2020): 41-66.https://www.academia.edu/44232462/Stumbling_along_the_Virtuous_Path_with_Rubenss_Drunken_Hercules

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