Dr Alice Sanger

Professional biography

I'm an honorary associate and associate lecturer and currently tutor on the MA in art history as well as undergraduate modules, A112: Cultures, A237: Art and Life before 1800 and A344: Art and Its Global Histories. I've previously taught on Renaissance and Baroque art and architecture at the Universities of Manchester and York, and at University College London, and on film at Royal Holloway University of London.  

I wrote my PhD (University of Manchester) on the art patronage and devotional practice of the Medici grand duchesses of the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.  On gaining my doctorate I was a Fellow at the British School at Rome. My publications have examined particularly the role of sacred relics in Baroque art and aristocratic devotional practice, and relationships between senses and art in early modernity, and include the co-edited anthology Sense and the Senses in Early Modern Art and Cultural Practice (Ashgate 2012, republished by Routledge 2018). 

My recent research has focused on a project on artists' houses with Helen Hills (University of York) entitled, Dwelling on the Everyday: Houses, Ghosts, Ellipses (Open Arts Journal, issue 11, summer 2024). I'm a contributing author to the OU module A237: Art and Life before 1800. My case studies on Caravaggio and touch, and fragrance in the Renaissance home, appear in the OU book Encountering Art (ed. William Kynan-Wilson, 2025).

I'm the managing editor of the Open Arts Journal (http://openartsjournal.org/), a fully open access academic publication coordinated by the Department of Art History at the OU.