Profile

Claire Sabitt is a graduate student studying early modern Italian works on paper under Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann. Sabitt received a B.A. in art history (with honors) from the University of Iowa, and an M.A. in the history of art from the University of Oregon. Her master’s thesis “Wearing the Hat of an Other: Alterity and Self-Fashioning in Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione’s Oriental Heads” explored early modern Italian depictions of the turbaned figure as the Other par excellence, and questioned the significance of place names in the context of the traveling artist. Sabitt’s current research focuses on the role of print as it relates to depictions of Ottoman Turks, and examines the proliferation of such imagery as a kind of early modern Orientalism. Other research interests include cross-cultural artistic exchange, Italian interactions with Dutch art, performativity and identity in port cities, and the power of print in the Mediterranean world.