The art, visual culture and built environment of Europe during the period between ca. 1300 and 1800 encompasses what has traditionally been regarded as several distinct areas of specialization. At UCSB, students are trained within these specializations according to the most rigorous standards, but they are also encouraged to think across and beyond the field about the larger issues that traverse and connect it with other disciplines and geographical areas.

Perhaps the most distinctive aspect of the way in which early modern European art is taught at UCSB is the emphasis on the relation of art to knowledge, and of art making, art collecting and writing about art to the production, organization and instrumentalization of knowledge. Whether we understand knowledge as the mental representations of individuals, as a social performance involving the manipulation of signs or as something embodied in the "objective" form of institutions, the preoccupation with it is deeply symptomatic, perhaps definitive, of early modern culture. The gathering and transmission of information, the development and mobilization of specialized technologies, and the critical, self-reflexive effort to distinguish legitimate from illegitimate modes of knowing, which are aspects of this preoccupation, all play important roles in the art of the period and contribute to its modern character.

Ann Jensen Adams’ research has focused upon the cultural work of seventeenth-century Dutch art – in portraiture, landscape, genre painting and calligraphy – in shaping both private and public identities. She is currently examining the way visual culture impacts the understanding of nature, particularly on conceptions of history and of time.

Mark Meadow’s research and teaching focus on the art of Northern Europe in the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries and its social and intellectual contexts. Whether treating artists such as Bruegel, Dürer and Aertsen, or topics such as Joyous Entries and Kunst- and Wunderkammern, his work involves a reconstruction of period viewing skills and habits of mind. His interest in examining early-modern collections as sites of active knowledge production has recently extended into an exploration of the status and functions of contemporary university collections.

Carole Paul specializes in the monumental interior decoration of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Italy, including the organization and display of art collections. Her work on the emergence of modern art museums in eighteenth-century Rome emphasizes the ways in which the arrangement of ancient and "modern" works deliberately played upon habits of looking, thinking, and speaking, and thus worked to frame the experience of art as a kind of creative social and cultural performance. 

Robert Williams' work on Italian art and art theory considers both objects and texts in relation to the larger art-historical process they document, the redefinition of art as a systematic and self-reflexive form of knowledge. This redefinition is manifest in all aspects of artistic practice, from purely technical considerations of medium and working method, to the organization of workshops and the training of young artists, as well as to the kind the "poetic" or "philosophical" expressivity one associates with the art of Renaissance Italy. The influence of this redefinition on Northern European artists, such as Rubens, and on subsequent periods, largely through the teaching of artistic academies on subjects such as the hierarchy of the genres, is also an aspect of his work.

In addition, the department has several faculty specializing in art of the eighteenth century, a period of transition from early modern to modern. Ann Bermingham's research interests have focused on the way in which artistic practices and works of art express new ideas on the nature of subjectivity, privacy, landscape, history, social responsibility, sentiment and sensationalism. She is currently exploring the eighteenth-century cult of feeling in the arts of painting and architecture. Richard Wittman is a cultural historian specializing in the architecture, town planning, and theory of early modern and modern Europe. His research addresses eighteenth-century architectural design, theory, and the architectural profession itself, and how these were transformed by the expansion of the press, the rise of political public opinion, and the changed status of the public as a sociological and discursive category.

This period also saw dramatically expanded contact between Europe and other cultures around the globe. By combining its strengths in the coverage of early-modern Europe and of Africa, the Americas and Asia, UCSB offers a unique opportunity to study the larger issues that span the period as a whole. Faculty whose expertise and research interests extend to other geographical areas include Nuha N. N. Khoury who covers sixteenth- and seventeenth-century urbanism in the Middle-East and elsewhere, Jeanette F. Peterson who works on the interchange of visual culture between Spain and its American colonies, and Miriam Wattles who examines the painting, ukyo-e and illustrated books of Edo period Japan.