Haohao Lu is a historian of early modern European art. Her area of specialization is sixteenth-century Netherlandish art, and her research focuses on the intersection of early modern visual culture, theories and practices of play, and reception studies.
Her current book project, Open Secret: Interpretive Risk and Spectatorial Experience of Early Modern Netherlandish Art, examines the social value of provocative ambiguity while treating exchanges among artist, object, and viewer as playful rivalry designated to cultivate desirable types of uncertainty. The objective of this study is to examine the ways early modern viewers constituted themselves in visual consumption.
Her additional research interests include early modern notions of eroticism and ugliness, visual and psychological histories of camouflage, and representations of early modern environmental understandings.
Professor Lu holds a Ph.D. and an M.Phil. in Art History from Indiana University and Leiden University, respectively, and a B.A. in Chinese Literature from Beijing Normal University. Her research has received support from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Allen Whitehill Clowes Foundation.
She teaches courses on early modern European art, including surveys of Italian and Northern Renaissance art, as well as research-based courses investigating cultures of play in Renaissance Europe (“The Playful Renaissance”) and early modern cultural exchanges (“Early Modern Europe and the World”). Before joining John Cabot University, Professor Lu was a Visiting Assistant Professor of Art History at Vassar College, where she taught Northern Renaissance and Baroque Art.
