Evelyn Welch

Evelyn Welch is a scholar of the Renaissance and Early Modern Period.

Welch was born Evelyn Kathleen Samuels in Boston, the daughter of Ellen Richards and John S. Samuels III. Her brother is actor John Stockwell. She was educated and raised in the United States, Evelyn Welch moved to the UK in 1981. A graduate of Phillips Exeter Academy, Harvard University and of the Warburg Institute, University of London, she now holds a professorship as well as the office of Vice-Principal for Arts & Sciences at King's College London, Previously, she had been Vice-Principal (Research & International) at Queen Mary, University of London and Pro-Vice Chancellor (Teaching & Learning) at the University of Sussex. She is a member of the Victoria & Albert Museum Board of Trustees and the British Library Advisory Board. Evelyn Welch specialises in art of the Italian Renaissance, as well as material culture, on which she has published extensively. Among these works is Shopping in the Renaissance: Consumer Cultures in Italy, 1400-1600, a winner of the 2005 Wolfson History Prize. Her current work is on fashion in Renaissance and Early Modern Europe.

She is the mother of singer and songwriter Florence Welch, frontwoman of the English rock band Florence and the Machine, and has two other children and three step-children.

Selected Works

• Art and Authority in Renaissance Milan (Yale University Press, 1995)
• Art in Renaissance Italy: 1350-1500 (Oxford University Press, 2000)
• Making and Marketing Medicine in Renaissance Florence (Rodopi, 2011)
• The Material Renaissance [editor] (Manchester University Press, 2007)
• Shopping in the Renaissance: Consumer Cultures in Italy, 1400-1600 (Yale University Press, 2005)