Brian Maxson
JOHNSON CITY (March 31, 2015) – Dr. Brian Maxson has been awarded a Craig Hugh Smyth visiting fellowship at Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. The fellowship provides financial support for study in Florence, Italy, and lifelong fellow privileges at I Tatti.
Maxson, an associate professor of history and assistant dean of the School of Graduate Studies at East Tennessee State University, is in residence at I Tatti until mid-June with top scholars from around the world whose research focuses on the Italian Renaissance.
Maxson is investigating the history of political corruption in Renaissance Italy.
“Traditionally, historians have conceived of the Renaissance world as lacking clear distinctions between private and public affairs,” Maxson said. “However, the conception and condemnation of political corruption in the period presupposes a distinction between the two.
“It is my hope that a deeper understanding of the conception and prosecution of political corruption during the Renaissance can shed light upon the origins and current ways that we view and regulate the private and public in our own day.”
Maxson is the author of “The Humanist World of Renaissance Florence,” published by Cambridge University Press in 2014, and co-editor of “After Civic Humanism: Learning and Politics in Renaissance Italy,” which was released in February by the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies at Victoria University in the University of Toronto.
He has previously received funding for his research from the Fulbright Foundation, the Dolores Zohrab Liebmann Foundation, the ETSU Research and Development Committee and the Marco Institute at the University of Tennessee. Since 2010, he has represented ETSU at multiple international venues, including Oxford University, the Ludwig Maximilians Institute in Munich, the University of Toronto and others.
Maxson holds his B.A. from Michigan State University and his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Northwestern University.
Funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Craig Hugh Smyth Fellowship is named after the third director if I Tatti (1973-85). Smyth, who died in 2006, was an American art historian whose work focused on conservation of Renaissance art and the recovery of stolen art and cultural objects, including works confiscated by the Nazis during World War II. He taught at New York University, as well as Harvard, and published “Mannerism and Maniera,” an important work in the study of Mannerist theory.
The fellowship established in Smyth’s memory is designed for scholars who do not have the benefit of sabbatical leave, including administrators, librarians, conservators and curators.