Sharifa Lookman, M.A.

Sharifa Lookman is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University, specializing in the art of early modern Italy. Her research explores workshop practice, labor, and class in the early modern bottega; the cross-fertilization of techniques across media; and the interplay between recipe literature and other forms of period “know-how.” Her dissertation resurrects the figure of the assistant-technician in the sculptor’s workshop and proposes a history of bronze as a history of process, taking as its subject the sculptor, Antonio Susini (1558-1624). To complement her academic research, she regularly takes courses at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and pursues historical reconstructions, often in dialogue and collaboration with practitioners and conservators alike.

Sharifa received her B.A. in art history from Wesleyan University and holds an M.A. in Italian Renaissance Art from Syracuse University in Florence and an M.A. in Art History from Princeton. She held internships at Harvard University’s Villa I Tatti in Florence and Hartford’s Wadsworth Atheneum and worked as a teaching assistant for the Syracuse University art history program in Florence, Italy, and an instructor in New Jersey state correctional facilities with Princeton’s Prison Teaching Initiative. Her research has been supported by Princeton’s Center for Digital Humanities and the Council on Science and Technology as well as the Dutch Institute for Art History in Florence (NIKI) and the Medici Archive Project. She is currently the Princeton predoctoral fellow in the Department Weddigen.