Noah Michaud

Noah Michaud’s research centers around the real and virtual encounters between Italy, chiefly the Republic of Venice, and sub-Saharan Africa in the early modern era. He studies the visual, material, and expressive cultures that contour these encounters, especially how these images and objects were acquired, conceived, interpreted, and integrated across continents. He is also especially interested in: global knowledge and representations of Africa and Africans, and African knowledge and representations of foreigners and foreign places; Italian Renaissance and African art historiography; the interactions of artmaking, archiving, scholarship, and violence; natural-historical illustrations and collections; ‘non-Western’ languages and aesthetics; connections between environmental, food, and art history; cultural heritage preservation and restitution—and contemporary art responding to these subjects. His current projects extend from his thesis about Alvise Ca’ da Mosto’s Navigazioni and its reception in Europe and West Africa.

Noah holds a B.A. in Art History with Distinction and a Concentration in Museum Theory and Practice from Duke University (2021) and an M.A. in Art History from the University of Florida (2023). He has interned at the Duke Digital Art History and Visual Culture Research Lab (2018-21), the Nasher Museum of Art (2020-1), and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art (summer 2022). His publications can be accessed here.