Sheila ffolliott

Sheila ffolliott

Emeritus Faculty

Sheila ffolliott taught art history at Mason from 1978-2009. She was also Chair of the Art Department and the Art History Department and Coordinator of Art History within the Department of History and Art History.

Recent publications include “Cosimo I and Catherine de’ Medici: Cousins and Rulers” for the Brill’s Companion to Cosimo I de’ Medici, forthcoming; “Artemisia Conquers Rhodes: Problems in the Representation of Female Military Heroics in the Age of Catherine de’ Medici” in Patronage, Gender & the Arts in Early Modern Italy: Essays in Honor of Carolyn Valone, eds. McIver and Stollhans (New York: Italica Press, 2015; “Women Artists” in the Ashgate Research Companion to Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, eds. Couchman, McIver, and Poska (Farnum: Ashgate, 2013); “Tapestry” for The Cambridge Shakespeare Encyclopedia, Volume I: Shakespeare’s World, ed. B. R. Smith; Introduction,” to Women Patrons and Collectors, eds. Bracken, Gáldy, and Turpin (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2012); “La Florentine” or “La bonne Françoise?” Some Sixteenth-Century Commentators on Catherine de’ Medici and her Patronage in Artful Allies: Medici Women as Cultural Mediators, ed. Strunck (Silvana Editoriale, 2011); “Catherine de’ Médicis: La Reine-Patronne Ideale de la Rénaissance?” in Les Femmes et les arts à la Renaissance: Patronnes et mécènes, d’Anne de France à Catherine de Médicis, ed. Wilson-Chevalier (Paris: Université de Saint-Étienne, 2007; “Learning to Be Looked at: The Portrait of [The Artist as] a Young Woman in Agnès Merlet's Artemisia,” in Reclaiming Female Agency: Feminist Art History after Postmodernism, eds. Broude and Garrard (University of California Press, 2005).

She has lectured widely here and abroad, delivering two conference keynote addresses (1997 and 2012) and plenaries at the annual meetings of the Renaissance Society of America (2006) and the Sixteenth Century Conference (2007).

Dr. ffolliott serves currently as President of the American Friends of Attingham and is a Trustee of the Medici Archive Project, and a former Board Member of the National Museum of Women in the Arts and the Jerome Foundation. She guest curated an exhibition at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Images of a Queen’s Power: The Artemisia Tapestries 1993 and served on the committee for the exhibition Italian Women Artists: Renaissance to Baroque (exhibition), National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, 2007. The Society for the Study of Early Modern Women presented her with a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2014 and her scholarship has received support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Folger Shakespeare Library, The Bunting Institute, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art.