Linda is a PhD candidate studying the art, architecture, visual, and material cultures of early modern Europe and the Atlantic world, with a special focus on exchanges between Italy, the Spanish Empire, and the Americas. Her work engages with visual legal cultures; the role of paintings and drawings within colonial and institutional mediascapes and administration; and the visual worlds, material techniques, and visual literacies of notaries and legal practitioners. Positioned at the junction of transregional art history, legal history, and the history of empires, her dissertation project, Drawn to Law: Legal Drawings in Early Modern Italy in an Age of Empire, examines artistic and notarial drawings and pictographs found in legal and juridical documents in early modern Italy, its shared territories with the Spanish Empire, and vice-royal New Spain. The project investigates the micropolitics of these visuals and their impact on decision-making processes and identity formation among civic, financial, political, ecclesiastical, and governmental bodies and communities.

She is currently completing her thesis as a doctoral fellow at the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome – Max Planck Institute and is an incoming participant of the Getty’s Connecting Art Histories’ initiative-funded 2024 Transregional Academy on Latin American Art at the Museo de Arte de Lima, Peru. Her doctoral research in Italian and American collections and archives has previously been supported by the Newberry Library, Villa I Tatti, and the Samuel H. Kress Institutional Fellowship at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence – Max Planck Institute. Her doctoral work at Harvard received additional support through the German Academic Scholarship Foundation’s transatlantic ERP Fellowship Program, the Douglas Dillon Fellowship Fund Award, the Arthur Kingsley Porter Travel Award, and grants provided by Harvard’s Graduate Student Council, Graduate School of Art and Sciences, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Prior to pursuing further studies in the United States, she earned an M.A. from Utrecht University in the Netherlands and a B.A. from Tuebingen University in Germany, both with a focus on early modern art history.

For her teaching at Harvard, Linda takes pride in being the recipient of the Bok Center Certificate of Distinction in Teaching Award and a nominee for the school-wide Derek C. Bok Prize for Excellence in Graduate Teaching of Undergraduates. At Harvard, she served as an At-Large Representative for International Students on the Executive Board of the Graduate Student Council, co-chaired her department’s Graduate Student Lecture Series Committee, and acted as a Graduate Student Representative on a departmental search committee for a senior faculty hire. She was also a PhD Representative with the Max Planck Society at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence and presently is Vice-Chair of the Emerging Scholars Committee of the Italian Art Society.

Complementing her academic work, she acquired curatorial training and expertise in material and technical art history, working with distinguished collections of European Renaissance and Baroque art. Notably, she held the 2015-16 Slifka Foundation Interdisciplinary Fellowship in the European Paintings Department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as positions at the Musée du Louvre in Paris, the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, and the Old Masters Picture Gallery in Dresden. Most recently, she researched and curated new displays for the Harvard Art Museums’ Italian Renaissance and Baroque sculpture collection. From her work at museums, contributions emerged for various collection and exhibition catalogues, including the forthcoming Harvard Art Museums’ Community Handbook (2024) and edited volume Art Museums and the Legacies of the Dutch Slave Trade (2024).