Jane Kromm

Jane Kromm, Professor of Art History, specializes in European art of the early modern period (1550-1800) and in feminist critique and women artists in the early modern and modern eras. Her current fields of interest include the representational history of madness, the architectural and environmental context of hostels and hospitals, and the meaning of position in the display of objects. Her Ph.D. is from Emory University, and her master’s is from Harvard Divinity School. Typical courses include: Women Artists and Feminist Criticism, The Caravaggio Effect, Photography the First Century, Madness and Modernism, Dutch Art and the Politics of Realism, and Introduction to Museums and Society.

Books and Essay Collections:

The Art of Frenzy: Public Madness in the Visual Culture of Europe 1500-1850, Continuum, 2002 (Bloomsbury).

A History of Visual Culture: Western Civilization from the 18^th to the 21^st c., edited with Susan Benforado Bakewell, Berg, 2010 (Bloomsbury) Contributed the general introduction, section introductions, and four essays: “To Collect is to Quantify and Describe: Visual Practices in the Development of Modern Science, pp. 73-88; “The Flaneur/Flaneuse Phenomenon, pp.147-156;“To the Arcade: The World of the Shop and the Store,” pp. 190-199; “InventingThe Mise-en-scène: German Expressionism and the Silent Film Set,” pp. 309-18.

Encyclopedia of Visual Culture, 3 vols, Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2026. Editor of part one, Volume one, “Histories,” contributing the section introduction and two essays:“Vision in the Rise of Modern Science,” and “Aesthetics and Antiquity: Daedalus, Pygmalion, and the Problem of Animation.”

Selected Articles:

“Anger, Envy and Aging: Early Modern Transgressive Old Women” in Frima Hofrichter and Midori Yoshimoto, eds., Women, Aging, and Art (Bloomsbury 2021) 49-61.  

“Anger’s Marks: Expressions of Sin, Temperament, and Passion,” in The Passions in the Arts of the Early Modern Netherlands, ed. Stephanie Dickey and Herman Roodenburg (Waanders, 2010), Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek, 60 (2010):35-51.

“Domestic Spatial Economies and Dutch Charitable Institutions in the late 16^th and Early 17^th c.” in Sandra Cavallo and Silvia Evangelisti, eds., Interiors: Domestic and Institutional Spaces in Early Modern Europe (Ashgate 2009), 103-118.

“Olivia furiosa: Maniacal Women from Richardson to Wollstonecraft” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 16:3 (April 2004): 343-72.

“Visual Culture and Scopic Custom in Jane Eyre and Villette. Victorian Literature and Culture, 26 (Spring 1998): 369-394.

“Marianne and the Madwomen,” Art Journal, 46, Linda Nochlin guest editor (Winter, 1987): 299-304.