Academic interests
My research arena is Western art and architecture from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries, particularly in the Southern Low Countries. I am most interested in the roles of imagery and buildings in shaping individual experience while forwarding the global programs of the Counter-Reformation Church, and I view this issue largely, though not exclusively, through the lens of women’s patronage and viewership. My work deals with collaborations between artists and patrons, relationships between art theory and historical image practices, the politics of display, social hierarchy, religious ritual, monastic and semi-monastic communities, theologies of idolatry and the miraculous, domestic material culture, and early modern property and inheritance law.
Background
I received my PhD in the History of Art and Architecture from Brown University in 2010 and thereafter held postdocs at the University of Bern and the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies. At Utrecht University I was Assistant Professor of Art History in 2017 and Associate Professor in 2018-2022, after which I spent several years as a freelance exhibition curator and developmental editor. My research has been supported by the Fulbright Foundation, Belgian American Foundation, European Research Council, and Swiss National Science Foundation.
Appointments
- Founder, Director at Higher Edventure (2022-present)
- Curator for Old Masters, Het Noordbrabants Museum (2023-2025)
- Associate Professor of Art History before 1850, Utrecht University (2018-2022)
- Assistant Professor of Art History before 1850, Utrecht University (2017)
- EURIAS Junior Research Fellow, Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (2015-2016)
- Advanced Mobility Fellow, Swiss National Science Foundation (2013-2015)
- Postdoc, European Research Council - Marie Curie Foundation (2010-2014)
- Junior Faculty (Wiss. Asst.), Institute for Art History, University of Bern (2009-2013)
Publications
Visual Culture at the Court Beguinages: Unconventual Women in the Hapsburg Low Countries 1585-1794. New York: Routledge, 2027 (already in print). https://www.routledge.com/Unconventual-Women-in-the-Habsburg-Low-Countries-1585-1794-Visual-Culture-at-the-Court-Beguinages/Moran/p/book/9789462986343
“Reform and Resistance in the 1540s, or How the Diest Beguines Tried to Get Rid of Their Priest,” in Women and Religion: Dissenters, Workers, Writers in the Early Modern European Context (1500-1700), eds. Francesco Quatrini and Katherine O’Donnell. London: Bloomsbury, 2026, 39-66. https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/early-modern-women-and-religious-innovation-9781350510562/
“Low Countries Women as Funders of Art and Architecture: Gender, Property Rights, and the Financing of the Flemish Baroque,” Journal of the Early Modern Low Countries 9.1 (2025), 240-263. https://doi.org/10.51750/emlc23024
“Het Antwerpse begijnhof,” in Begeesterde vrouwen. Een rijke religieuze geschiedenis (Honderd Jaar Ruusbroecgenootschap, 2), eds. Lieke Smits, Tine van Osselaer, John Arblaster, and Daniël Ermens. Leuven: Peeters, 2025, 73-91. https://www.peeters-leuven.be/detail.php?search_key=9789042957237&series_number_str=3&lang=en
Review: “Gender and Self-Fashioning at the Intersection of Art and Science: Agnes Block, Botany, and Networks in the Dutch seventeenth Century (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023), by Catherine Powell Warren,” in Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal 20.1 (Fall 2025): 193-195. https://doi.org/10.1086/736780
“Court Beguinage Mistresses as Art Curators,” in Campaspe Talks Back. Women Who Made a Difference in the Arts in the Early Modern Low Countries. Essays in Honour of Katlijne Van der Stighelen, eds. Lieke Van Deinsen, Bert Schepers, Marjan Sterckx, Hans Vlieghe, Bert Watteeuw. Turnhout: Brepols, 2024, 314-323. https://www.brepols.net/products/IS-9782503613055-1
“Women and Artistic Knowledge in the Family: Mechelen Beguinage Grand Mistress Clara Eugenia Brueghel,” in Brueghel: The Family Reunion, ed. Nadia Groeneveld-Baadj. ’s-Hertogenbosch: WBooks, 2023, 107-113. https://wbooks.com/winkel/deutsch-english/brueghel-family-reunion/
Review: “Judith Noorman (ed.), Gouden vrouwen van de 17de eeuw van kunstenaars tot verzamelaars. Zwolle: WBooks, 2021,” Oud Holland Reviews (August 2022). https://oudholland.rkd.nl/index.php/reviews/78-review-of-gouden-vrouwen-van-de-17de-eeuw-2020
Women and Gender in the Early Modern Low Countries, 1500-1750. Co-edited with Amanda Pipkin. Studies in Medieval and Reformation Traditions, vol. 217. Leiden: Brill, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004391352. Open access: https://brill.com/view/title/11207
“Introduction,” co-authored with Amanda Pipkin, in Women and Gender in the Early Modern Low Countries, 1500-1750, eds. Sarah Joan Moran and Amanda Pipkin, eds. Women and Gender in the Early Modern Low Countries, 1500-1750. Studies in Medieval and Reformation Traditions, vol. 217. Leiden: Brill, 2019, 1-20. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004391352_002. Open access: https://brill.com/display/book/edcoll/9789004391352/BP000009.xml
“Resurrecting the ‘Spiritual Daughters’: The Houtappel Chapel and Women’s Patronage of Jesuit Building Programs in the Spanish Netherlands,” in Sarah Joan Moran and Amanda Pipkin, eds. Women and Gender in the Early Modern Low Countries, 1500-1750. Studies in Medieval and Reformation Traditions, vol. 217. Leiden: Brill, 2019, 266-322. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004391352_010. Open access: https://brill.com/display/book/edcoll/9789004391352/BP000017.xml
Journal of Early Modern History Volume 22, Issue 1-2 (March 2018): Perspectives On Women’s Religious Activities, coordinated and edited with Silvia Evangelisti and Lehtsalu. https://brill.com/view/journals/jemh/22/1-2/jemh.22.issue-1-2.xml
“Introduction: Perspectives on Women’s Religious Activities in Early Modern Europe and the Americas,” Co-authored with Silvia Evangelisti and Liise Lehtsalu. Journal of Early Modern History 22 (2018), 1-7. https://doi.org/10.1163/15700658-17-00009
“Women at Work: Governance and Financial Administration at the Court Beguinages of the Southern Low Countries in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.” Journal of Early Modern History, 22 (2018), 67-95. https://doi.org/10.1163/15700658-17-00010
Review: “Clara Peeters: aan Tafel! & El arte de Clara Peeters,” in Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal 11.2 (2017), 166-172. https://doi.org/10.1353/emw.2017.0016
“Bringing the Counter-Reformation Home: The Domestic Use of Artworks at the Antwerp Beguinage in the Seventeenth Century,” Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art 38.3 (2015-16), 144-158. http://www.jstor.org/stable/26382527
“‘The Right Hand of Pictura’s Perfection’: Cornelis de Bie’s Het Gulden Cabinet and Antwerp Painting around 1660,” Netherlands Yearbook for Art History (NKJ) 64 (2014), 370-399. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43884406
“A cui ne fece dono: Art, Exchange, and Affective Prayer in Anthony van Dyck’s Lamentation for the Antwerp Beguines,” in Sensing the Divine: Religion and the Senses in Early Modern Europe, eds. Christine Göttler and Wietse de Boer, Leiden: Brill, 2013. 219-256. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004236653_010
Review: “Als in een spiegel: Vrede, kennis en gemeenschap op het Antwerpse Landjuweel van 1561. Jeroen Vandommele,” Sixteenth Century Journal 43.4 (Winter 2012): 1269-1270. https://doi.org/10.1086/SCJ24245073
“Of Locked Doors and Open Windows: Architectural Strategies at the Court Beguinages in the Seventeenth Century,” Chicago Art Journal 20 (2010): 2-27.
“Guarino Guarini’s Architecture in Print,” in The Theater That Was Rome: Sixteenth- to Eighteenth-Century Views and Maps, ed. Evelyn Lincoln. Providence: RISD Press, 2005.