Main Focus
- Early modern architecture and urbanism
- Earthquakes and natural disasters
- Fortifications
- Mediterranean Studies
Research Project
Curriculum Vitae
Sofia Hernandez is a doctoral candidate at Princeton
University, working under the supervision of Professors Carolyn Yerkes and
Basile Baudez. She is an
architectural historian of the early modern Mediterranean, focusing on Italian
architecture and urbanism. Her research investigates the relationship between
architecture, political power, and natural disaster in Spanish Italy. Her
dissertation focuses on the rebuilding of eastern Sicily after the earthquake
of 1693, and the response of the Spanish Crown. More broadly, her research
deals with cultural exchanges between Spain and Sicily throughout the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Since 2023, Sofia has been a contributing author to
The Digital Piranesi, a developing digital humanities project that aims to
provide an enhanced online edition of the works of Italian illustrator,
Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778). Alongside a group of interdisciplinary
and international scholars, Sofia is writing catalog entries for Piranesi’s
views of volume one of Le Antichità Romane (1756). Sofia received
her B.A. in art history from Columbia University (2019). She is currently the
Princeton pre-doctoral research fellow in the Department of Prof. Dr. Tanja Michalsky
at the Bibliotheca Hertziana.