Dana E. Katz is an Assistant Professor of Art History and Humanities at Reed College. She is the author of The Jew in the Art of the Italian Renaissance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming Spring 2008). Her new book project studies Jews and mythmaking in the early modern Venetian ghetto.

Current Project
My new book project, The Vertical City: Jews and Mythmaking in Early Modern Venice, investigates the political ideologies embedded within the walls of the Venetian Ghetto to explore how Jews in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Venice negotiated their position as social, cultural, and religious outsiders in a city dominated by Christians but dependent on Jewish credit and trade. I will study details of construction and design to deconstruct how the Ghetto's extraordinary building heights, irregular fenestration patterns, and distinguishing synagogues correspond to contemporary notions of space, surveillance, boundaries, and community.

-Dana E. Katz