Alina A. Payne, a professor of art and architecture history at Harvard University, has been appointed the seventh director of the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies at Villa I Tatti in Florence, Italy. She will begin her new duties this coming summer.
Dr. Payne is the Alexander P. Misheff Professor in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard. She previously taught at Oberlin College and the University of Toronto. She is the author of several books including The Telescope and the Compass: Teofilo Gallaccini and the Dialogue Between Architecture and Science in the Age of Galileo (Olschki, 2012) and From Ornament to Object: Genealogies of Architectural Modernism (Yale University Press, 2012).
Dr. Payne is a graduate of McGill University in Montreal. She holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. from the University of Toronto.
The Center for Italian Renaissance Studies was founded in 1961 at Villa I Tatti, the house and library of the art critic and connoisseur Bernard Berenson, who was a member of the Harvard University Class of 1887. The center is located outside of Florence on 75 acres of land and includes extensive gardens and a working farm.