Dr Lorenzo Gatta

Dr Lorenzo Gatta was a Visiting Research Fellow from 21 February to 30 August 2025.

Lorenzo is a cultural historian with a keen interest in the architecture and material culture of the early modern period. Trained as an architect at the Accademia di Architettura di Mendrisio and the KTH in Stockholm, he then completed an MA and a PhD in the history of art at The Courtauld Institute. His dissertation explored the intersections of ritual, space, and materiality in the confessionals of the seventeenth-century Southern Netherlands. Lorenzo’s work has been supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation and the Nederlands Interuniversitair Kunsthistorisch Instituut in Florence. As a research Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies, he will investigate the political resonance of Indigenous architecture in the early modern Atlantic World.

Indigenous Architecture and the Early Modern Political Imagination

Lorenzo’s project sought to trace the cultural resonance of Indigenous North American architecture across the Early Modern Atlantic World, by looking at travel accounts, maps, diplomatic documents, and oral histories.