Flora Dennis
Professor in the Department of Art History, University of Sussex
Flora Dennis joined the Art History department at the University of Sussex in 2008. After a Ph.D. in Musicology at the University of Cambridge, Professor Dennis was Research Fellow at the AHRC Centre for the Study of the Domestic Interior (V&A, Royal College of Art and Royal Holloway, University of London, 2001-6), co-curator of the major V&A exhibition, At Home in Renaissance Italy (2006-7) and co-editor of the accompanying book. She has published widely on the visual and material culture of music and sound, focusing on Italy between the mid-fifteenth and the early seventeenth centuries. Her research uses objects, images and texts to trace the changing cultural importance of music in everyday life. She is interested in the ways in which sound influenced the design, use and experience of domestic space, and in sound’s role in constructing social relationships in the home.
Professor Dennis has been awarded fellowships from Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies (2007-8), the V&A (2008-11; 2015-17), the Italian Academy, Columbia University (New York, 2011) and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (Berlin, 2018), and research grants by the AHRC (2010-11) and the Leverhulme (2023-4). She co-instigated The Listening Gallery, an AHRC-funded Knowledge Transfer collaboration between the V&A and the Royal College of Music, recording music for the Medieval and Renaissance galleries.
