Ben Weil
Ben Weil is a PhD Candidate studying medieval art, with a focus on representations of cities in fourteenth-century Italy. His dissertation investigates the patronage, production, and reception of these images to determine how urban elites and itinerant artists attempted to define cities visually and the ways citizens responded to this attempt at community formation. Ultimately he seeks to understand the role these images played in shaping the relationship between the urban built environment, its visual representation, and its imagination by residents. More broadly he is interested in urban planning, the history of cartography, and medieval urban life.
Before coming to Northwestern he earned a BA in art history and international studies at the University of Michigan and was the O’Brien Curatorial Fellow at the Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota where he curated “Capturing Change: the Urban Images of Berenice Abbott and Giovanni Battista Piranesi.”