Beth Saunders

Beth Saunders’ writing on photography has appeared in numerous edited volumes, exhibition catalogues, and journals. She is co-author of Apollo’s Muse: The Moon in the Age of Photography (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2019). Her research has been supported by The Met, the American Academy in Rome, and the MFA Houston.

Beth will be working on a book tracing the simultaneous introduction of photography to Italy in 1839 and the birth of Italy’s nationalist movement, the Risorgimento, within an international context. This project illuminates how Italy’s distinctive political and cultural circumstances made it an influential center of transnational exchange, and argues that dispersal and transnationalism were both characteristic of and necessary for the development of the new medium of photography and of Italian nationalism.