BA, MA (McGill), PhD (Oxon)
Dr. Spencer is an art historian who teaches art and visual culture topics in the Early Modern Studies Program. She earned her PhD from the University of Oxford where she was a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Doctoral Fellow. Before joining the University of King’s College, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at The Huntington Library in San Marino, California, and a Fonds de recherche sur la société et la culture- Québec (FRQSC) Postdoctoral Fellow at Carleton University.
Dr. Spencer is currently completing a book entitled Peeping In, Peering Out: Monocular Vision and Early Modern Art, which examines the role of monocular vision in the development of optical illusions from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century. Her research has been supported by, among others, the Renaissance Society of America, the Getty Research Institute, the Newberry Library, the Huntington Library and the Dutch Institute for Art History in Florence, Italy.
As an undergraduate, Dr. Spencer was a first-generation university student, and she welcomes the opportunity to mentor other first-generation students at King’s.
Teaching & Research Interests
Art and science in the early modern period
Theories of vision and optical illusions
The practice of collecting
Visual cultures of travel and global exchange
Selected Publications
“Habits and Habillement in Seventeenth-Century Voyages: Georges de La Chappelle’s Recueil des Divers Portraits des Principals Dames de la Porte du Grand Turc” in Artes Apodemicae and Early Modern Traveling Culture, 1550-1700 [Intersections: Interdisciplinary Studies in Early Modern Culture], vol. 64, eds. Karl Enenkel and Jan de Jong (Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2019), pp. 310-332.
“Illusion as Ingenuity: Dutch Perspective Boxes in the Royal Danish Kunstkammer’s ‘Perspective Chamber’” Journal of the History of Collections, vol. 30, iss. 2 (July 2018), pp. 187-201.
“Border Cultures” (book review) esse arts + opinion, no. 87 (May, 2016)
“La vie abstraite 1: Le temps transformé / La vie abstraite 2: Espace du silence, Marie-Claire Blais and Pascal Grandmaison” (exhibition review) esse arts + opinion, no. 87 (May, 2016)
