Jean Marie Christensen is a doctoral candidate and lecturer in Art History at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. She specializes in the political, social, and theoretical intersections with the conventions of early modern English portraiture. Her on-going dissertation, “Bodies of the Crown: Kinship, Health, and the Construction of the Royal Body in Early Modern English Portraiture,” investigates Tudor-Stuart imagery by examining royal and aristocratic portraiture’s relationship with ideas of the family and court culture as mitigating visible disability. Her dissertation argues that the idealized royal portrait is a collaborative construction and the location where cultural expectations and anxieties about the human body are negotiated in favor of representing monarchical authority. She is a 2023-2024 Folger Institute Fellow.
