Shira Brisman is a scholar of art produced between 1400 and 1800 in German, French, and Dutch-speaking lands and their areas of contact. Her publications foreground commitments to advancing the study of print culture, reimagining the relationship between material and form, and engaging critically with early modern political theory.
Treated over numerous of articles, two single-authored books, and one co-edited volume, these concerns center around what Brisman has described as a history of social art—an attentiveness to how art can connect people across geographies and time periods, but also how it can serve as a divisive agent that foments claims about hierarchy. In her first book, Albrecht Dürer and the Epistolary Mode of Address (University of Chicago Press, 2016), she argues that unstable methods of sending and receiving letters in the era of the Reformation shaped how Germany’s most innovative printmaker conceived of the message-bearing properties of the work of art.
Brisman’s second book, The Goldsmith’s Debt: Conceptions of Property in Early Modern Art (University of Chicago Press, 2026), presents the first extended study of the Nuremberg goldsmith Christoph Jamnitzer (1563-1618). It argues that distinctive forms of gilded silver objects and their circulating designs legitimized claims of ownership of land and dominion over subjugated peoples made by a wide range of commercial and political actors. Drawing upon commentaries on Roman and customary laws printed throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, The Goldsmith’s Debt proposes that art configured new structures of heritability, transmission, and legitimacy of rule during the rise of capitalism.
Taking a critical approach to the “material turn,” Brisman’s work has addressed problems of art’s matter within the context of historically embedded questions of scarcity, use, and reuse by posing disciplinary questions about the limitations of analytical methods that claim to be scientific. In 2024, together with Caroline Fowler, Brisman co-edited “Political Ecologies of Early Modern Paper in Early Modern Art, 1500-1800,” a special-issue edition of the journal Art History, whose introduction and essays explore the ways in which a single medium was used by artists, authors, and archivists as an instrument of political organization and the reassessment of economic and moral values.
Two new projects continue Brisman’s investigation of how art provokes social exclusion, while also proposing that certain works challenge the hegemonic codes that neighboring works promote. “Fictions of Communality” considers how early modern painters and the organization of their trade played a role in constructing what “security” meant in early modern cities. A second book-length project, “The Silence Seen Everywhere,” investigates the spaces where women’s speech was legally permitted, if highly managed, in early modern Europe. Comparing juridical arenas where women could give legal testimony with those parts of the public sphere where patriarchal authorities tried to stamp out female protest and negotiation, the project describes how the widespread fear of women’s unruly voices shaped the design of clothing, jewelry, headdresses, and the regulations that permitted how and by whom these objects could be worn.
Brisman’s teaching is dedicated to radically re-envisioning what the study of early modern art has to contribute to the discipline of art history and to the humanities at large. In addition to specialized seminars, she regularly teaches longer historical surveys, including “Ideology and Landscape,” “Prints and Politics,” and ARTH 1020, “Renaissance to the Present.” For her dedication and innovative approaches, she has won a Trustees Council of Penn Women Award for undergraduate advising (2021) and in 2024 was nominated for a Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching.
Brisman received her B.A. (2001), M.A. (2008) and PhD (2012) from Yale University. Prior to her arrival at Penn, she taught as Andrew W. Mellon Lecturer and Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia University and as Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, the Albrecht Dürer Scholarship at the Germanisches Nationalmuseum, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, The American Philosophical Society, the Wolf Humanities Center and the Kress Fellowship in the Literature of Art at the Clark Art Institute. In 2023, she gave extended interview for the podcast In the Foreground, entitled “To Give Shape to a Way of Seeing the Past.”
