Heather Hyde Minor

Biography

Heather Hyde Minor specializes in the artistic and intellectual culture of early modern Italy. From 2017-2020 she served as the academic director of ND Rome. Her research interests include architecture, print culture, and the study of antiquities.

She is the author or editor of five books. The first, The Culture of Architecture in Enlightenment Rome (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), won the Howard Marraro Prize and the honorable mention for the Alice Davis Hitchcock Award from the Society of Architectural Historians. The second, Piranesi’s Lost Words, examined Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s famous printed images alongside the texts he designed to go with them (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015). She edited Piranesi: Testi teoretici e polemici, the third volume of the Edizione nazionale dei testi delle Opere di Giovanni Battista Piranesi (De Luca, 2026) and co-edited The Serpent and the Stylus: Essays on G.B. Piranesi (University of Michigan Press, 2006).

Her newest book, Piranesi Unbound, co-authored with Carolyn Yerkes, was brought out in 2020 by Princeton University Press. “Piranesi on the Page,” an exhibition they co-curated was on view at Princeton University in 2021.

Support for her research has come from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Center, and the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute.

Together with colleagues at Stanford and Princeton, she organizes the Rome Archive Seminar, a funded opportunity for graduate students who want to learn how to use the Roman archives and libraries for their doctoral research: https://rome.nd.edu/research/projects-activities/rome-seminar/

She is currently at work on a biography of Giovanni Battista Piranesi, co-editing a volume on printed maps of Rome from the fifteenth- and sixteenth-centuries, and a study of ancient material objects and historical doubt in the 1700s.