McKeever, Sheena

Sheena McKeever studies histories of reconstruction and its interconnections between artistic, medical, and scientific practices across early modern Europe.

McKeever’s research interrogates how early modern disciplines concerned with the restoration of the human body raised conceptual boundaries between nature and artifice. She examines how and by which epistemic frameworks natural bodies and landscapes became sites subjected to manipulation and repair. The subject of her current research focuses on artistic media and techniques in sixteenth–eighteenth-century Europe, especially France and Italy.

Prior to Columbia, McKeever received her MPhil at the University of Cambridge (History of Art) and Honors BA at the University of Toronto (Art History, Classics). She has curated a library exhibit on “Diagnosing Difference: Visual Treatments of the Anomalous Building” (University of Cambridge), worked as an archivist assistant at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies (University of Toronto), studied art conservation (Royal Ontario Museum), and excavated on classical archaeological projects in Greece (Palaikastro) and Italy (Falerii Novi).