Elizabeth A. Honig

Elizabeth Alice Honig works on the art, literature, and visual cultures of Early Modern Europe. Her interests span the pictorial arts, the built environment, and civic ritual; the art market and practices of collecting; the mobility of objects and imagery; domestic material culture and ideas of dwelling; copying and originality; notions of visuality in literary texts; gender and representation; and historical techniques of painting. She also works within the Digital Humanities and has integrated mapping, network analysis, and digital text analysis into her teaching.

Honig’s first book, Painting and the Market (Yale 1998), concerned the ways in which painting responded to changing notions of value, exchange, and display in the commercial city of Antwerp from about 1550-1625. Her next book, Jan Brueghel and the Senses of Scale (Penn State 2016), focused on a single artist and how he proposed an aesthetic in the years around 1600 that countered those of his colleagues Rubens and Caravaggio in operating at a very small representational scale that demanded a closer visual engagement and mobilized the sense of touch as well as sight. Most recently, in Peter Bruegel and the Idea of Human Nature (Reaktion 2019) she examines Bruegel, Erasmus, and ideas of what it meant to be human in 16th-century Northern Europe. Her current projects concern Nicholas Hilliard and small things in Elizabethan England; and the spaces and experiences of confinement, particularly incarceration, in early modern Europe. Honig maintains a suite of websites about the Brueghel family, the central one being janbrueghel.net. For these and other projects she has received funding most recently from the NSF, IMAF, the Mellon Foundation, CITRIS, the Townsend Center, and the Berkeley Digital Humanities program.

Honig’s graduate students have worked on a diverse range of topics in the arts of The Netherlands, England, Spain, Germany, and the New World; they study painting, architecture,
pageantry, costume, and urban planning; violence, propaganda, devotion, repetition, identity, and failure. Before coming to Maryland, Honig taught at Tufts University and at the University of California, Berkeley and held visiting positions at universities in Leiden and Utrecht.