Dr. Anne Leader

Anne Leader is Visiting Fellow at IATH, where she has developed Digital Sepoltuario, a searchable database that chronicles the memorial landscape of medieval and Renaissance Florence. The Digital Sepoltuario team, which Leader serves as lead historian and content creator, has received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Richard Lounsbery Foundation, the Kress Foundation, and the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation. Dr. Leader’s research on Florence’s memorial culture has also been supported by Harvard University, the American Philosophical Society, the Renaissance Society of America, the Savannah College of Art and Design, and ARTstor.

Leader holds a History-Art History BA from Emory University, and she earned her MA and PhD in the History of Art and Archaeology from the Institute of Fine Arts (NYU). She was Rush H. Kress Fellow at Villa I Tatti, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, where she completed her monograph The Badia of Florence: Art and Observance in a Renaissance Monastery (2012). She edited and contributed to Memorializing the Middle Classes in Medieval and Renaissance Europe (2018) and revised and edited Giuliano de'Medici: Machiavelli's Prince in Life and Art by Josephine Jungić (2018). A full list of her publications can be found at Academia.edu.

Most recently, in her role as co-director of Florence Illuminated, a collaboration of five digital humanities projects including Digital Sepoltuario, Leader led her team of digital humanists from UVA, the University of Chicago, Indiana University, University of Bologna, and W&L University to a successful Humanities Collections and Reference Resources grant from the Division of Preservation and Access at the National Endowment of the Humanities, which will fund their project Florence Illuminated: Visualizing the History of Art, Architecture, and Society from 1 September 2024 through 31 August 2026. This is her second HCRR grant, the first for Digital Sepoltuario: Scholarly Access and Search from 1 June 2021 through 31 May 2024. Since 2017, Leader has secured grant funds totaling $540,191 for IATH's work on Digital Sepoltuario and its participation in Florence Illuminated, based at the University of Chicago.