Sonja Drimmer

Sonja Drimmer is a scholar of medieval European art with expertise in illuminated manuscripts and early print. Before joining the department in 2013, she received her BA from Brown University and PhD from Columbia University. For the 2026-2027 academic year she will be the W. Ford Schumann Distinguished Visiting Professor in Democratic Studies at Williams College.

Her research is largely concerned with premodern notions of authorship and authority, media theory, book history, reproduction, and the aesthetics and material culture of politics. She maintains a strong interest in historiography and in particular how mediation, reproduction, and restoration shape the reception of objects over time: this concern extends into commentary she has written for both public and scholarly venues regarding the incursion of machine learning and artificial intelligence into the humanities and art history in particular.