Italian Research Seminar: Lia Markey (Center for Renaissance Studies, Newberry Library) // Events // Medieval Institute // University of Notre Dame

As part of the 2026 Fall Italian Research Seminar series, the Center for Italian Studies is pleased to host a lecture by Lia Markey, Director of the Center for Renaissance Studies at Chicago’s Newberry Library, titled:

Mapping Brazil in Medici Florence: Dudley’s Arcano del Mare

Robert Dudley’s Dell’arcano del Mare (Secrets of the Sea), an enormous sea atlas published in 1646-1647, includes a substantial section that describes and illustrates a journey to South America on behalf of the Medici in 1608 as well as Dudley’s own travels there in the 1590s. This talk examines the atlas itself, exploring various editions as well as related letters about and preparatory drawings for the atlas. An analysis of these documents and of the text and images in the Arcano reveals the significance of the South American maps within the large multi-volume work. Ultimately, I argue that Dudley produced these particular maps and their related texts in the atlas to connect his own geographical knowledge to the Medici dynasty’s ‘imperial’ aspirations and to help promote the production of the atlas itself.

Lia Markey is the Director of the Center for Renaissance Studies at Chicago’s Newberry Library where she is responsible for conferences, symposia, workshops, seminars, and digital humanities projects devoted to medieval and early modern studies. Dr. Markey’s research examines cross-cultural exchange between Italy and the Americas in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, collecting history, and early modern prints and drawings. Publications include Imagining the Americas in Medici Florence (Penn State University Press, 2016) and a co-edited volume The New World in Early Modern Italy, 1492-1750 (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Her edited volume, Renaissance Invention: Stradanus’s “Nova Reperta” (Northwestern University Press, 2020) complemented the Newberry Library’s fall 2020 exhibition by the same title and includes catalog entries as well as contributions from a related Newberry symposium. Most recently, she co-curated the Newberry exhibition Seeing Race Before Race and co-edited a volume with the same name with Noémie Ndiaye (2023). Dr. Markey has taught at Northwestern University, the University of Pennsylvania, and at Princeton University and held fellowships at the Folger Library, the Warburg Institute, Harvard's Villa I Tatti, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Herzog August Bibliothek, and the European University Institute in Florence. She is currently working on articles and books related to the conception of Mannerism, cartography, and Medici patronage and she is involved in two collaborative projects focused on the slave trader Francesco Carletti and the naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi.

The Italian Research Seminar, a core event of the Center for Italian Studies, aims to provide a regular forum for faculty, postdoctoral scholars, graduate students, and colleagues from other universities to present and discuss their current research. The Seminar is vigorously interdisciplinary, and embraces all areas of Italian literature, language, and culture, as well as perceptions of Italy, its achievements and its peoples in other national and international cultures. The Seminar constitutes an important element in the effort by Notre Dame's Center for Italian Studies to promote the study of Italy and to serve as a strategic point of contact for scholarly exchange.