Lecturer I in History of Art and Lecturer I in Kinesiology
About
Jennifer Gear specializes in Early Modern Italy with a focus on Venice and the Veneto region. She is interested in the visual culture of wellness and healing, and her recent research on plague epidemics explores the important place of art and architecture in treating disease in the Early Modern world.
Dr. Gear is also a Lecturer in the School of Kinesiology where she co-teaches courses in Movement Science in which students learn to evaluate anatomical models of the human body from the 16th century to today, considering prevailing beliefs about body structures and their function at the time the models were created. This approach encourages students to engage critically with anatomical teaching tools that give the appearance of objectivity, but in fact, are only proxies for an actual body; in every model, various distortions and adjustments are inevitable.
Areas of Interest:
Memory and memorials; historiography and periodization; histories of anatomy and medicine; technology and the body; arts-based pedagogy; wellness and the visual arts
Recent articles and essays:
“Using Represented Bodies in Renaissance Artworks to Teach Musculoskeletal and Surface Anatomy,” co-authored with M. Melissa Gross and Wendy Sepponen, Anatomical Sciences Education, (12 August 2023), https://doi.org/10.1002/ase.2326
“Performing Plague: Antonio Zanchi and the Dynamics of Spectatorship at the Scuola Grande di San Rocco in Venice,” Renaissance Studies, v. 32, n. 5 (November 2018), 708–737.
“Domenico Tintoretto and the 1630–31 Plague,” in Art, Faith, and Medicine in Tintoretto’s Venice, eds. Gabriele Matino and Cynthia Klestinec (Venice: Marsilio, 2018), 69–74.
Courses taught:
HISTART 194: Acting on Art in Renaissance Italy (first-year seminar)
HISTART 250: Italian Renaissance art (survey)
HISTART 393 and 394: The Black Death and Beyond (seminar and lecture)
KINESLGY 302: Art and Anatomy in Renaissance Italy (GoGlobal study abroad program in Italy)
MOVESCI 313: The Art of Anatomy (mini-course supported through a grant from the U-M Arts Initiative; featured in a U-M Library news article on October 6, 2023, “The Body Human,” by Alan Piñon)
