Staff profile

I am a Barker Doctoral Student  with the Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (IMEMS), working on 'Daphne and her Sisters: Framing Gendered Violence' project as part of the IMEMS' Inventing Futures programme. My research on the reception of Artemisia Gentileschi is in Italian Studies and Art History. I am an active member of the Medieval and Early Modern Student Association (MEMSA) serving on the executive committee as the co-convenor of the 20th annual MEMSA conference for the year 205/26, and as vice chair for the year 2026/27. With an academic background in Modern Languages and Cultures, I have studied literature and art across the UK, Ireland, France, and Italy. My specific interest in Caravaggism was ignited during an Erasmus placement at the Università degli Studi di Catania, where I examined the intersection of literature and visual culture in the Italian Renaissance and beyond.

My thesis, provisionally titled 'Whose Artemisia: the Making and Remaking of a Female Artist' investigates the construction of the artist's identity through transnational dialogues. Specifically, I analyse the tension between connoisseurship and art history, Artemisia's role in the development of Seicento Neapolitan art, and her reconstruction through the dual lenses of anglophone feminism and the legacy of the Rivolta Femminile, and the history of exhibiting Artemisia's works. My research into Artemisia has led me to focus on Roberto Longhi and Anna Banti, a teacher-student husband-wife duo whose careers in the world of art developed differently, with Longhi remaining in art criticism and curation and Banti turning towards writing fiction. While the thesis is centred on Artemisia herself, I am equally interested in who writes about Artemisia and for what purpose, and I also consider disciplinary questions regarding what art history is and how the discipline itself has evolved. 

• Artemisia Gentileschi
• Italian Renaissance, Counter-Reformation and Baroque painting
• Reception of Caravaggism
• Traditions of art criticism
• Roberto Longhi and Anna Banti
• Early Modern studies
• Women's cultural history

Book review

• Italian Science Fiction and the Environmental Humanities,edited by Daniel A. Finch-Race, Emiliano Guaraldo and Marco Malvestio, Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 2023, x + 280 pp., £65 (hardback), ISBN 9781802078701
  
  Cohen, A. S. (2025). Italian Science Fiction and the Environmental Humanities,edited by Daniel A. Finch-Race, Emiliano Guaraldo and Marco Malvestio, Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 2023, x + 280 pp., £65 (hardback), ISBN 9781802078701. Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism, 29(1), 97-99. https://doi.org/10.1080/14688417.2025.2450872

Conference Paper

• Artemisia as Interlocutor: Roberto Longhi's Dialogues with the Seicento
  
  Cohen, A. S. (2026, July 13 – 2026, July 14). Artemisia as Interlocutor: Roberto Longhi’s Dialogues with the Seicento [Conference paper]. Presented at MEMSA 2026: ’Connection, Conversation, Contention: Encounters in the Medieval and Early Modern World’, Durham University.
• Anti-Ocularcentric travel: the importance plausibility over visibility in Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (1516/32) and Calvino’s Le città invisibili (1972)
  
  Cohen, A. S. (2023, August 31). Anti-Ocularcentric travel: the importance plausibility over visibility in Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (1516/32) and Calvino’s Le città invisibili (1972) [Conference paper]. Presented at ASLE-UKI 2023 ’Transitions’, University of Liverpool.

Presentation

• Depictions of (living and) dying in the works of Artemisia Gentileschi
  
  Cohen, A. S. (2025, November 27). Depictions of (living and) dying in the works of Artemisia Gentileschi. Presented at Southwark Schools Learning Partnership, Queens College London.
• Artemisia Gentileschi with Ava Siena Cohen
  
  Cohen, A. S. (2025, October 2). Artemisia Gentileschi with Ava Siena Cohen. Presented at The HerStory Project Podcast, Online. The HerStory Project Podcast.
• The Feminist in the Frame: how Artemisia Gentileschi foregrounds the female figure as a subject
  
  Cohen, A. S. (2024, May 15). The Feminist in the Frame: how Artemisia Gentileschi foregrounds the female figure as a subject. Presented at Italian Symposium 2024, North London Collegiate School.