Allison Stielau is a NOMIS–eikones Fellow at eikones – Center for the Theory and History of the Image at the University of Basel, Switzerland, and lecturer in early modern art at University College London, UK.
Stielau is an art historian specializing in the visual and material culture of early modern northern Europe. She studied English at Yale University (New Haven, US) and the history of decorative art, design and culture at the Bard Graduate Center (New York, US). In 2015 she received a PhD in art history from Yale University and in 2016 she joined University College London as lecturer in early modern art.
Her research has been supported by the Getty Research Institute, McGill University, Leverhulme Trust, Renaissance Society of America, and the British Academy. She has published chapters in a number of edited volumes as well as articles in kritische berichte, German History, West 86th, and Metropolitan Museum of Art Journal.
Research Focus
Much of Stielau’s research focuses on the social relationships that form around and with objects. Moments of crisis in early modernity, such as wars, financial emergency, and religious change, test the limits of those relationships and throw them into stark relief. The fate of gold and silver artifacts in such moments is particularly revealing, for they can be invested with great symbolic value but they always remain capable of being melted and transformed: into different symbolic objects or into currency. The “molten potential” of metals has fascinated Stielau, beginning with research for her 2015 dissertation, and her publications have explored questions of affect, value and ontology with regard to gold and silver artifacts and currency in numerous case studies.
The culmination of this work is her current monograph, which she will be completing during her NOMIS Fellowship. Entitled Molten: The Value of Silver Treasure Under the Threat of Dispossession, 1600–1650, the book tracks silver cups and other precious objects through the tumultuous decades of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1638) and contemporaneous conflicts in northern Europe. This period of catastrophic infrastructural damage and loss of life mobilized and displaced long-held cultural treasures in large numbers. Silver articles were taken as booty, as funds for military defense, or as ransom to protect life and limb. They were also concealed for protection and hoped-for later retrieval. The pressures that war placed on silver plate expose the ambivalent status that such artifacts held as both raw financial assets and resonant keepsakes signifying the identity of individuals and communities.
Allison Stielau portrait by Alessandro Frigerio