Dr Ariella Minden
Lecturer in Early Modern Art History (1400-1800)
Biography
Ariella Minden joined the School of Art History in 2026. Prior to her arrival in St. Andrews, Ariella served as scientific assistant (wissenschaftliche Assistentin) in the department of Prof. Dr. Tristan Weddigen at the Bibliotheca Hertziana-Max-Planck-Institut für Kunstgeschichte in Rome. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Toronto in 2024 with the disssertation entitled "In Dialogue: Medial Thinking in Bolognese Printmaking 1500-1530", which was awarded the 2025 Wolfgang Ratjen Prize from the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich. Ariella has held fellowships in Prof. Dr. Alessandro Nova's department at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz-Max-Planck-Institut (2018-22) and in Dr. Sietske Fransen's research group "Visualizing Science in Media Revolutions" at the Bibliotheca Hertziana (2022-23).
Teaching
AH1003 Art in Europe and Beyond 1600-1800 (Winter 2026)
AH4206 Raphael and his Reception (Winter 2026)
Research areas
Ariella Minden is a specialist in fifteenth and sixteenth century Italian art. Her research uses media theory as a lens through which to explore the emergence of new artistic technologies. Ariella's first book project seeks to write a media history of Italian Renaissance printmaking by tracking the expansive network of intermedial relationships integral to defining woodcuts, engravings, and etchings in their relative infancy. Her second project, Media Literacies in Early Modernity, considers the role of media in the creation, adjudication, and comprehension of works of art, architecture, and material culture between 1400 and 1700. This project seeks to attune us to how the interrogation of media took place at different registers, among diverse actors, and was mobilized to myriad socio-cultural and political ends. In so doing, it addresses questions surroudning the relationship between media and trust, expertise, government oversight, and visual training that resonate with our own vexed media landscape with the aim of situating new and increasingly dangerous challenges to media literacy within a longer history of new media.