Nicholas Herman

Nicholas is the Lawrence J. Schoenberg Curator at the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies. He also serves as Medieval Studies Librarian at Penn Libraries, and is Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of History of Art in the School of Arts & Sciences. His work as an art historian and special collections librarian engages with the world of book illumination through many lenses, considering questions of materiality and facture, collecting history, and the intersections of this resplendent art form with other media across the pre-modern world.  

Nicholas received a doctorate in 2014 from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, with a dissertation focusing on the multimedia French Renaissance court painter, Jean Bourdichon. From 2007 to 2010, he worked in the department of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York. Prior to arriving at Penn in 2016, he was Hanns Swarzenski and Brigitte Horney Swarzenski Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Samuel H. Kress Foundation Institutional Fellow at the Courtauld Institute of Art, and a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow at the Université de Montréal. He has contributed to numerous catalog and exhibition projects in Europe and North America, and has published articles in Word and Image, Burlington Magazine, Journal of the History of Collections, Manuscripta, and Gesta. His books include Le livre enluminé, entre représentation et illusion (2018), Making the Renaissance Manuscript: Discoveries from Philadelphia Libraries (2020), and, co-written with Anne-Marie Eze, Bourdichon's Boston Hours(2021). In Spring 2020 he was Craig Hugh Smyth Fellow at Harvard University's Villa I Tatti.

At Penn, Nicholas enhances the collection through strategic manuscript acquisitions, teaches with faculty across departments, plans exhibitions and conferences, and co-edits the Schoenberg Institute's open-access journal, Manuscript Studies. He is also co-director of the Books as Symbols in Renaissance Art (BASIRA) project, and serves as a member of the History of Art and Comparative Literature graduate groups.