Dr. Erin Giffin is currently a visiting assistant professor at Hamilton College (Clinton, NY, USA), and a member of the editorial board of the Sculpture Journal. Previously, Dr. Giffin has received a Renaissance Society of America (RSA) fellowship at the Virginia Fox Stern Center of John Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD (2023); been the Robert Lehman Fellow at I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence, Italy (2021-2022); was a Foreign PhD Research Fellow at the Dutch Institute of Art History (NIKI), in Florence, Italy (2016); and a Kress Fellow of the Medici Archives Projects (2014).
At KNIR, Dr. Giffin will continue her research on religious prints of the Santa Casa di Loreto and their international spread. Her current project, on the engraver Giacomo Lauro and his network of patrons, emerges from her forthcoming monograph: Early Modern Replicas of the Santa Casa di Loreto: Translating Space (Routledge, 2025). Giacomo Lauro’s connections spanned Eastern and Western Europe, which ensured the broad diffusion of his designs. His Santa Casa images are just one facet of his greater image network, which the artist himself documented in his signature book (Stammbuch) across the first half of the seventeenth century.
Dr. Giffin’s research on the Santa Casa began during a postdoctoral position (wissentschaftliche Mitarbeiterin) in the research group SACRIMA: The Normativity of Sacred Images in Early Modern Europe (PI: Chiara Franceschini) based at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich (2017-2021), and funded by the European Research Council. Beyond the monograph, Dr. Giffin is also co-editor of a volume on the global expansion of Loretan media, entitled The Itinerant Shrine: Art, History, and the Multiple Geographies of the Holy House of Loreto (Brill, forthcoming 2026) in the Mediterranean Art Histories series (MAH).
