Claire Farago taught Early Modern art, theory, and criticism until her retirement in 2017 as Professor Emerita. She remains an active scholar in an international arena. In 2022, she presented papers in Berlin, Dresden, Heidelberg, Los Angeles, London, Ottawa, and at the College Art Association annual conference in New York. In her three decades of teaching and service to the Department she held various administrative posts including Director of Graduate Studies for Art History, Assistant Chair for Undergraduate Studies, and Coordinator of Art History. In collaboration with her colleagues, she developed the undergraduate curriculum and established three new graduate degree programs, the BA/MA in Art History, the M.S. in Museum Studies/Art History, and the Ph.D. in Art History. She has held visiting professorships at UCLA, UNC-Chapel Hill, the University of Melbourne, York University, U.K., the University of Zurich, and elsewhere. In fall 2021 she was Ruth and Clarence Kennedy Visiting Professor in Renaissance Studies at Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts. She currently lives in Los Angeles, where she is an Affiliate of the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.
The author or editor of sixteen books and more than seventy scholarly articles, Farago has published widely on the manuscripts of Leonardo da Vinci, Early Modern art theory, cultural exchange, the materiality of the sacred, the history of style, museums and collecting practices. Her anthology, Reframing the Renaissance (Yale, 1995) is widely recognized as a groundbreaking contribution to cross-cultural studies. She recently published The Fabrication of Leonardo da Vinci’s Trattato della Pittura, with a scholarly edition of the editio princeps (1651), 2 vols., (Brill Press, 2018), serving as senior contributing editor of a decade-long collaboration with an international team of Leonardo specialists, with support from the Getty Research Institute, the Fulbright Foundation, the Kress Foundation, and the University of Colorado. She is currently completing a book entitled, Cultural Memory in the Era of Climate Crisis: Writing Borderless Histories of Art, forthcoming from Routledge Press.