Faculty Profiles

Jenny Sakai is an art historian specializing in early modern (approximately 15th-18th centuries) art. She was trained as a historian of northern European art, and her current teaching and research focus on early modern art in the context of colonialism and imperialism. She is interested in what happens to artistic form, content, style, and function when works of art cross temporal, cultural, political, ideological, or theological boundaries. She completed her BA and PhD in the History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley, and she is the recipient of a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship and a Samuel H. Kress Institutional Fellowship. Jenny has published in the Journal of Art Historiography, and her article on the 17th-century Dutch inventor, cityscape painter, and fire captain Jan van der Heyden, will be published in a forthcoming issue of the interdisciplinary journal Word & Image.