Dr Hester Schadee

Chronologically, my research focus is on the renaissance (or the later middle ages, or the earlier early modern period). I am interested in the uses and abuses of the past, including classical reception and the history of scholarship. These strands come together in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italian humanism, which is the subject of most of my publications.
I teach and supervise more broadly, on topics related to Italy, memory, representation, and the arts, and the cultural history of ideas.

I recently (september-december 2020) held a Senior Balsdon Fellowship at the British School at Rome, for a project entitled 'Roman relics and Renaissance Collectors 1350-1500'. It considers the questions of when, why and how discarded remains of the classical past became coveted collectibles. You can watch my public lecture on the topic here.
At the BSR I worked with the artist Paul Eastwood to curate a pop-up exhibition, Memento Monumenta, inspired by my research themes. Galleria Matèria, Rome, recorded a podcast on the project in their Pillow Talk series.

I am involved in two collaborative projects to unlock humanist literature for a wider audience. One is an edition and translation of writings by Poggio Bracciolini and friends On Leaders and Tyrants, in press in the I Tatti Renaissance Library (Harvard University Press), with Keith Sidwell and David Rundle. The other, Eulogies. Six Laments for Dead Friends, with Jeroen De Keyser, is an edition, translation and commentary on Poggio's six funerary orations, which came out in 2023.

Recent publications include my co-edited volume Evil Lords: Theories and Representations of Tyranny from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Oxford University Press, 2018), which traces the various roots, developments and communalities of Western thought on Bad Rule in eleven chapters; and my open-access article ‘A Tale of Two Languages: Latin, the Vernacular, and Leonardo Bruni’s Civic Humanism’, Humanistica Lovaniensia 57, 1 (2018), which analyses the political dimension of humanism's cultivation of the Latin language, while offering a key to the vexed interpretation of Bruni's willfully contradictory Dialogues for Pier Paolo Vergerio.

I have a BA in Ancient and Modern History, an M.Phil. in Greek and Roman History, and a D.Phil. in Modern History, all from Oxford. I held a Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts at Princeton University, and an Exzellenz Research Fellowship at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich. I started as a lecturer at Exeter in September 2014.