About

Lily Filson is a scholar of early modern art and technology, specializing in the history of art, architecture, and mechanics from antiquity through the Italian Renaissance. Her research explores intersections of sculpture, engineering, architecture, religion, and the natural sciences across cultures and geographies — from ancient ritual landscapes in Yemen to the hydraulic marvels of Renaissance Florence.

Her first monograph, Renaissance Automata of the Villa Pratolino: Magic, Mechanics, and Medici Ambition (Palgrave Macmillan/Springer, 2025), examines the extraordinary water-driven machines and mechanical sculptures at the Medici villa outside Florence, showing how art, technology, and spectacle shaped courtly culture in the late Renaissance. She has also authored the textbook An Expanded Global History of Art, Architecture, and Technology with a Preliminary Introduction of South Arabia to the Canon (Kendall Hunt, 2022).

Dr. Filson received her Ph.D. in 2018 from Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, funded by a European Research Council Doctoral Fellowship, and her M.A. in Art History from Syracuse University, where she was a 2008-2010 Florence Fellow. She earned her B.A. in Art History from Tulane University in 2008. Her recent work has been supported by fellowships from the American Institute of Yemeni Studies, the Mellon Foundation’s RaceB4Race initiative, a Kress Travel Grant, and the Academy of Sciences of Czech Republic. Her scholarship has been widely published in peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes. In addition to her research, she is a filmmaker producing short scholarly works distributed by ProQuest that bring historical research to life, including projects on Yemeni queens in Renaissance manuscripts and Medici automata.

Her primary research interests include the histories of art and technology, the relationship between material culture and spectacle, cross-cultural exchange in the early modern world, and methodologies for making art history relevant to contemporary discussions of race, gender, and heritage.

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