Dr. Stephen Campbell’s research and publication in the field of pre-modern Italian art have dealt with the role of art in courts, cities and state formation; the Renaissance literature and theory of art; the body, sex and gender; the histories of collecting and canon formation, and more recently the geographies of art in Italy and the Mediterranean.

His are recent books The Endless Periphery.  Towards a Geography of Art in Lorenzo Lotto’s Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019) and Andrea Mantegna: Humanist Aesthetics, Faith, and the Force of Images (Turnhout: Brepols, 2020). 

The Da Vinci Myth: An Anti-Biography of Leonardo will appear in 2024, as will The Routledge Companion to Global Renaissance Art, a volume with an international team of 47 contributors which he co-edited with Stephanie Porras. 

He is also the co-author, with Michael W. Cole, of Renaissance Art in Italy 1400-1600.  London, Thames and Hudson, 2011; second expanded edition 2017, which has also appeared in Italian and in Japanese. 

His other books are The Cabinet of Eros.   Renaissance Mythological Painting and the Studiolo of Isabella d'Este (New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2006) and Cosmè Tura of Ferrara. Style, Politics and theRenaissance City 1450-1495 (New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1997).   

He has curated and co-organized several exhibitions: Cosmè Tura: Painting and Design in Renaissance Ferrara (Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, 2002); Artifice and Illusion: Carlo Crivelli of Venice (also at The Gardner, 2015), and The Renaissance Nude 1400-1530 (The Getty Museum and Royal Academy, London, 2018-19). 

Dr. Campbell was educated at Trinity College, Dublin (BA 1985), the University of North Carolina (MA 1987), and Johns Hopkins University (1993). Before joining the faculty of Johns Hopkins in 2002, he taught at Case Western Reserve University (1993-94), the University of Michigan (1995-1999), and the University of Pennsylvania (1999-2002). In 1993, he published a book for a general audience on the Great Irish Famine of 1847-1851, with a preface by President of Ireland Mary Robinson.   

He has held post-doctoral fellowships at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1994-95); the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies at Villa I Tatti in Florence (1999-2000); and the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery, Washington (2005-06); The Clark Institute, Williamstown Massachusetts, 2016. 

In November 2018 he gave Sydney J. Freedberg Lecture in Italian Art at The National Gallery, Washington. 

Selected Journal Articles

"Eros in the Flesh: Petrarchism, the Embodied Eros and Male Beauty in Italian Art, 1500-1540." Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 35 (2005). 

“Bronzino’s Martyrdom of St. Lawrence. Counter Reformation Polemic and Mannerist Counter Aesthetics.” RES 46: Polemical Objects (2004), 99-121.

“Giorgione’s Tempest, Studiolo Culture, and the Renaissance Lucretius.” Renaissance Quarterly 56 (2003), 299-332 (co-winner of the RSA Nelson Prize, 2004).

“Fare una cosa morta parer viva: Michelangelo, Rosso, and the (Un) Divinity of Art.” Art Bulletin LXXXIV (2002.), 596-620.

"The Carracci, Visual Narrative, and Heroic Poetry after Ariosto. The Story of Jason in Palazzo Fava." Word and Image 18 no. 3 (2002), 210-230. 

“Sic in amore furens. Painting as Poetic Theory in the Early Renaissance.” I Tatti Studies: Essays in the Renaissance VI, 1995, 145-69.

“Pictura and Scriptura. Cosmè Tura and Style as Courtly Performance,” Art History 19, June 1996, 267-95.