Jutta Sperling

Professor of History
Jutta Sperling
Contact Jutta

Mail Code CSI
Jutta Sperling
Franklin Patterson Hall 208
413.559.5578

Teaching at Amherst College from Fall 2019-Spring 2023.


Jutta Sperling, professor of history, received her M.A. from the Universität Göttingen in 1987 and her Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1995.

Her teaching interests focus on the social and cultural history of early modern Europe, with a special emphasis on Renaissance visual culture, body history, Catholicism, and comparative Legal studies of the Mediterranean.

Her most recent research centers on the Madonna Lactans in late medieval and Renaissance art (see her article in Renaissance Quarterly, 73.1 Fall 2018). Her books include two monographs entitled Roman Charity: Queer Lactations in Early Modern Visual Culture (transcript Verlag, 2016) and Convents and the Body Politic in Late Renaissance Venice (University of Chicago Press, 1999) as well as two edited volumes Across the Religious Divide: Women, Property, and Law in the Wider Mediterranvan, with Shona Kelly Wray (Routledge, 2009) and Medieval and Renaissance Lactations: Images, Rhetorics, Practices (Ashgate, 2013). She published numerous articles on allegories of Charity, the Madonna Lactans, the history of marriage, and Portuguese women's property rights in the Renaissance.

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