Graham Lea

Fellow

Fellow and Assistant to the Executive Director

Graham R. Lea is a historian of late medieval, renaissance, and early modern art of the Low Countries, and he specialises in art and art theory of the Netherlands, 1500-1650. Lea received a Ph.D. in art history from Emory University and a Ph.D. in art history from the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen in 2022, a J.D. from the University of Memphis in 2012, and a B.A. in art history and classics from Vanderbilt University in 2006.

His current research interests revolve around the relationship between visual art, theatre, humanism, rhetoric, and theology. He presently works on a project exploring the biblical history paintings by Hendrick Goltzius (1558–1617) and Pieter Lastman (1583–1633), specifically focusing on how these Dutch painters assimilate local rhetorical dramaturgy and performance practice found in the work of local rhetoricians (rederijkers).

Lea, Graham R. “Exploring Complex Emotions through the Portrayal of Dialogic Exchange: Pieter Lastman’s Paul and Barnabas in Lystra of 1617.” In Motus Mixti et Compositi: The Portrayal of Mixed and Compound Emotions in the Visual and Literary Arts of Europe, 1500-1700, 647–74. Leiden: Brill, 2025.