Julia DeLancey

Professor of Art History University of Mary Washington

  • Fredericksburg VA

Dr. DeLancey is an expert in the art history of early modern Italy, 15th & 16th century Italian painting, history of art in Venice & more

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October is Disability Awareness Month - contact a UMW expert if you are covering

One in four Americans lives with a disability, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. At the University of Mary Washington, it’s one in eight. “With those sorts of numbers, it’s mind-boggling [that] disability doesn’t have more automatic inclusion when people think about diversity,” said UMW Professor of English Chris Foss. As the Americans with Disabilities Act’s 30th year and October’s Disability Awareness Month shine a light on one of the country’s most underrepresented groups, so does a new UMW course. Offered for the first time this fall, Intro to Disability Studies (IDS) delves into the 21st-century experience of a diverse population, exploring cognitive, sensory, mobility and other differences as just as essential to the human condition as gender and race. The 16-week course fans out across disciplines, examining disability throughout the lifespan in historical, political, social and other contexts. Years in the making, the class is team-taught by faculty and staff – from art history, education, English, historic preservation, psychology and the Office of Disability Resources (ODR) – who’ve poured their time and passion into the topic in hopes it gains traction. “It took a lot of meetings, discussion and work on Google Docs to pull this together,” said Professor of Art History Julia DeLancey, who borrows from her first-year seminar, “The Beauty Difference Gives Us,” to deliver an IDS session on how disabilities affect artists’ work. If you are a journalist looking to cover Disability Awareness Month and the Americans with Disabilities Act’s 30th year, then let the experts from the University of Mary Washington help with your story. Dr. Julia DeLancey and Dr. Chris Foss are available to speak with media about this important topic – simply click on either icon to arrange an interview today.

Julia DeLanceyChris  Foss

Biography

How did early modern Venetians perceive disability? An art history professor whose past research has focused on the history of visual culture in Venice and Florence, Julia DeLancey first became interested in the topic after a conversation with a friend who worked in disability studies.

“I asked her if people in the past defined disabilities the way that people do today, and when she said they didn’t, it was like a lightbulb going off,” said DeLancey, who decided to examine the history of visual culture as it pertains to disabilities in sixteenth-century Venice.

Researching confraternities – organizations supporting laypeople that met for religious devotion – led her to information about those who experienced visual and mobility impairments. Paperwork for a centuries-old court case showed that two confraternities – one for those with visual impairments – had a conflict over a painted altarpiece.

DeLancey’s prior archival research focused on color sellers in early modern Venice, people in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries who imported, manufactured, bought, sold, and exported a wide array of coloring materials. Pigments and dyes played a central role in the rich, colorful items (including glass and paintings) available in the lagoon city and in the city’s international reputation as a source for beautiful goods of all kinds.

DeLancey joined the University of Mary Washington faculty in 2017, after 22 years teaching art history at Truman State University. At UMW, DeLancey teaches art history surveys and first-year seminars, including one on disability studies. Her courses cover a variety of art historical topics, including ancient Rome; Medieval, Renaissance/early modern, and Baroque art; Dada and World War I; Michelangelo; Leonardo da Vinci (science and art); art and gender; and the theory and historiography of art history.

This summer, DeLancey presented as part of UMW’s COVID-19 in Context course series. She joined colleagues for a three-part talk entitled “Visual Arts and Plagues: Responses from Early Modern Italy, Museums and Zen Buddhism.” DeLancey focused on how Italians in the Renaissance period replied to outbreaks of the bubonic plague.

Areas of Expertise

History of Disabilities
Pigments
Color Sellers
Art History of Renaissance Italy
Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-century Italian Painting
Sellers of Artists’ Materials
History of Art in Venice

Accomplishments

National Endowment for the Humanities

Summer Stipend

Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation

Venetian Research Program Grant

Educator of the Year, Truman State University

2002

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Education

University of St. Andrews

Ph.D.

History of Art

1997

University of Michigan

B.A.

History of Art

1987

Affiliations

  • Member, Renaissance Society of America
  • Member, Sixteenth Century Society
  • Member, College Art Association
  • Member, Italian Art Society

Media Appearances

Disability Justice

With Good Reason, Radio IQ 88.3  online

2020-01-10

Julia DeLancey explains how people with different types of bodies organized and advocated for their rights hundreds of years ago in early modern Venice.

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DeLancey Presents Free Lecture on ‘Florence and the Medici,’ Nov. 8

EagleEye UMW Faculty/Staff Newsletter  online

2019-11-02

Sponsored by the Fredericksburg-Este Association, Professor of Art History Julia DeLancey presented a free lecture on “Florence and the Medici” at St. George Episcopal Church on Friday, Nov. 8. In the lecture, DeLancey “explored the powerful Medici family and its patronage of the arts and humanism in Renaissance Florence.”

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DeLancey Presents Research on Visual Culture and Visual Impairments in Early Modern Venice

EagleEye UMW Faculty/Staff Newsletter  online

2019-10-22

Julia DeLancey (Professor of Art History) presented a paper entitled “The Visual Culture of the Confraternity of the Blind in Early Modern Venice” at the 50th meeting of the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference. The paper, based on new archival research in the Archivio di Stato (state archives) in Venice, explored the activities of a group (confraternity) formed in the fourteenth century so that Venetians with visual impairments could ask for alms in the lagoon city.

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Event Appearances

The Visual Culture of the Confraternity of the Blind in Early Modern Venice

Sixteenth Century Studies Conference  St. Louis, USA - 2019

Articles

Celebrating citizenship: Titian's portrait of the color seller Alvise Gradignan della Scala and social status in early modern Venice

Torrossa

2017

Using new archival discoveries made mainly in the Archivio di Stato in Venice, the article places Titian’s portrait of his colleague and supplier into the larger social and artistic context of Renaissance Venice and presents new information about color sellers and their place in Venetian social hierarchy.

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'In the Streets Where They Sell Colors': Placing "vendecolori" in the urban fabric of early modern Venice

JSTOR

2011

This article examines the relationship between the color seller (vendecolori or dai colori) trade in Venice in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the urban fabric of the city. It examines the nature of this particularly Venetian of businesses, of the goods in which it deals, and of its guild associations.

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