Jennifer Gear, PhD

Dr. Jennifer Gear is an art historian who specializes in Early Modern Italy with a focus on Venice and the Veneto region. She is interested in the visual culture of wellness and healing, and her recent research on plague epidemics explores the important place of art and architecture in treating disease in the Early Modern world. Dr. Gear is a Lecturer in the History of Art department where she also completed her PhD in 2018.

Dr. Gear co-teaches courses in Movement Science in which students learn to evaluate anatomical models of the human body from the 16th century to today, considering prevailing beliefs about body structures and their function at the time the models were created. This approach encourages students to engage critically with anatomical teaching tools that give the appearance of objectivity, but in fact, are only proxies for an actual body; in every model, various distortions and adjustments are inevitable.

In 2023 Dr. Gear co-authored an article in Anatomical Sciences Education with Dr. Melissa Gross. This article evaluated the effectiveness of teaching musculoskeletal and surface anatomy using represented bodies in Renaissance works of art, part of their study abroad program based in Italy.

Courses taught in Kinesiology at the undergraduate level: KINESLGY 302 (Art and Anatomy in Renaissance Italy – GoGlobal program); MOVESCI 313 (The Art of Anatomy, funded through a grant from the U-M Arts Initiative).