Rate My Professor Sarah Kyle

Sarah Kyle is Professor and Chair of the Department of Art & Visual Culture in Iowa State University's College of Design, as well as Interim Director of the Center for Excellence in the Arts and Humanities. She is a historian of late medieval and Italian Renaissance art and ideas, with research specializing in illustrated botanical manuscripts as sites of convergence for Pan-Mediterranean medical traditions, humanist enterprises, and artistic currents, particularly in the courts of northern Italy and Venice during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Her scholarly interests encompass early Renaissance Italy, Renaissance and baroque humanities, alchemy, art and medicine in early modern Italy, baroque Rome, Dante’s “Inferno,” early modern traditions, medicine and humanism in late medieval Italy, and pharmacology in Renaissance Venice.

Kyle holds a BA in Visual Arts and English with honors from the University of Western Ontario (2000), an MA in History of Art from Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario (2002), and a PhD in History of Art from Emory University, Atlanta (2010). She also earned an e-learning facilitation certification from the Center for eLearning and Connected Environments (2019). Before Iowa State, she served as Professor of Humanities and Director of the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies program at the University of Central Oklahoma, including advisory board membership for the Melton Art Gallery. Her key publication is the monograph Medicine and Humanism in Late Medieval Italy: The Carrara Herbal in Padua (Routledge, 2016); she is completing The Mirror and the Key: The Roccabonella Herbal and Pharmacology in Renaissance Venice. Kyle has secured grants from the Kress Foundation/International Center of Medieval Art (2019), Friends of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries (2019), American Philosophical Society (2017), Renaissance Society of America (2016), and DaVinci Institute (2016). She held fellowships as research fellow at the University of Iowa Obermann Center for Advanced Studies (2017-2018) and faculty fellow at the University of Hawaii East-West Center (2017-2019), has lectured internationally, and belongs to the College Art Association, Renaissance Society of America, International Center of Medieval Art, Association of Graduate Liberal Studies Programs, Council on Undergraduate Research, and Humanities Education Research Association.