Jacob Eisensmith

Jacob Eisensmith serves as Berg Postdoctoral Fellow in Art History at Macalester College, specializing in early modern Italian visual culture and Mediterranean intercultural networks from 1400-1600. His research examines how political centers like Venice, Naples, and Constantinople used art as soft power to control peripheral regions including Southern Italy and the Balkan Peninsula.

He completed his PhD at the University of Pittsburgh with the dissertation "Anxieties and Influences: Italian Cultural Entanglements with ethnic Ottoman Empire, 1400-1600". His current projects investigate Venetian art consumption in the Bay of Kotor and Ottoman influence on Southern Italian artistic preferences.

Dr. Eisensmith teaches courses including Italian Renaissance Art, Southern Italian Art: Gothic to Global, and The Arts of Empire: European Global Empires of the Early Modern World, emphasizing transcultural exchange in global contexts.

His research has received prestigious support:

• Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation
• Samuel H. Kress Foundation
• Kunsthistorisches Institute in Florence
• Center for the Art and Architectural History of Port Cities at La Capraia, Naples

His work bridges art history with imperial studies, focusing on political dimensions of artistic style in contested territories under Venetian and Ottoman influence.