Jean Marie Christensen

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.

As a doctoral candidate, she has taught upper-division classes on the History of British Art and the History of Picturing Children and the Family in Art. She has published a portion of her dissertation, “Assembling the King’s Body: Examining Holbein’s Portrait Techniques and the Fashioning of Henry VIII’s Image in the English Renaissance,” in Renaissance Papers in 2022.  Her dissertation has been supported by a research grant from the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and she has received the University of California Los Angeles’ American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Clark Fellowship, and the Omohundro Institute-Folger Institute Residential Short-Term Research Fellowship at the Folger Shakespeare Library for the 2023-2024 academic year.