Convenors 2023

Dr Adelina Modesti is an Honorary Senior Fellow in Art History in the School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne, and former Australian Research Council Post-Doctoral Fellow at La Trobe University (History), researching women’s cultural patronage and networks in early modern Italy. Prior to this she was an AEUIFAI Postdoctoral Fellow at the European University Institute, Florence, and Lecturer in Theory and History of Art and Design at Monash University (1984-2002). She received her doctorate from Monash in 2006 with a dissertation on the artist Elisabetta Sirani of Bologna, on whom she has published widely, including a 2014 monograph-catalogue raisonné. Adelina’s research focuses on female cultural production and patronage by women in early modern Italy, the cultural exchange and transfer of luxury goods between the courts of Europe, and the textile production of nuns and court ladies. Her latest book Elisabetta Sirani (Lund Humphries, London, Getty Publications, Los Angeles) was published in June 2023.
Together with Dr Consuelo Lollobrigida, Adelina is also editor of the new series by Brepols, Women in the Arts: New Horizons. For many years she was an AWA Advocate in Florence for the Advancing Women Artists Foundation, founded by the late Dr Jane Fortune. Her publications include:

Adelina Modesti, Elisabetta Sirani (London, Lund Humphries, and Los Angeles, Getty Publications, 2023)
Adelina Modesti, Women’s Patronage and Gendered Cultural Networks in Early Modern Europe. Vittoria della Rovere, Grand Duchess of Tuscany (London & New York: Routledge, 2020)
Adelina Modesti, Elisabetta Sirani ‘Virtuosa’. Women’s Cultural Production in Early Modern Bologna (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014)
Adelina Modesti, Elisabetta Sirani. Una virtuosa del Seicento bolognese (Bologna, Editrice Compositori, 2004).