Sarah Wilkins

Sarah Wilkins is a specialist in Late Medieval and Renaissance art history. Her scholarship focuses on patronage, the cult of the saints, and representations of women in Late Medieval Italy. She has received numerous awards for her work, including a RSA-Samuel H. Kress Research Fellowship in Renaissance Art (2020), a Fulbright fellowship and a Mellon dissertation finishing grant. She has presented papers at many conferences, most recently at the Renaissance Society of America (2025). She is also an organizer of the biennial Ladis Memorial Trecento Conference, which will be held in October 2025 in Athens, Georgia.

Dr. Wilkins’s forthcoming article, “Late Medieval Vita Panels and Mary Magdalen as a Gendered Model of Penitence,” will be published in late 2025 in Women and Gender in Trecento Art & Architecture: Images, Ideals, Realities, edited by Judith Steinhoff. She is series editor of the Trecento Forum book series, published by Brepols, and recently served as President of the Italian Art Society (2021-2023).

She is currently on sabbatical (Fall 2025) working on her book exploring the usage of the chapel in the Bargello of Florence over time, titled Creation, Transformation, Loss, and Rediscovery: The Magdalen Chapel in the Palazzo del Podestà, Florence, 1320-1840.

PhD, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

MS, Pratt Institute

BA, Vanderbilt University

Books:

Co-editor with Holly Flora, Trecento Forum I: Art and Experience in Trecento Italy, Proceedings from the Andrew Ladis Memorial Conference, New Orleans, 2016. Turnhout: Brepols, 2019.

Selected Articles:

“Mary Magdalen in the ‘Wilderness’ of Provence,” in Environmental Narratives and the Eremitic Turn, a special issue of Different Visions 12 (2025).

Co-author with Corinna Gallori, “Mendicant Orders and Late Medieval Art Patronage,” in Oxford Bibliographies in Medieval Studies, edited by Paul E. Szarmach. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022: http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com

“Countenances as Lightning: The Materiality of the Noli me tangere Fresco in Assisi,” in Convivium 5, no. 2 (2018): 82–97.

“Adopting and adapting Formulas: The Raising of Lazarus and Noli me tangere in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua and the Magdalen Chapel in Assisi,” in La Formule au Moyen Âge, edited by Elise Louviot, 251–271, ARTEM 15. Turnhout: Brepols, 2013.

“Imaging the Angevin Patron Saint: Mary Magdalen in the Pipino Chapel in Naples,” in California Italian Studies 3, no. 1 (2012). Available at http://escholarship.org/uc/item/7pz6w018