Anne L. Williams is assistant professor of visual culture and public practices in the School of Art, Art History & Design. She is a historian of visual culture from 1300 to 1600 in Italy, northern Europe and their trans-Atlantic networks.

Her research addresses histories of parody and subversion, particularly the intertwining of satire and the sacred. She is the author of “Satire, Veneration, and St. Joseph in Art, c. 1300-1550” (Amsterdam University Press 2019) and is currently completing her second monograph, “Irreverent Images: Parody and the Sacred in Pre-Reformation Italy.” For this project, she was the recipient of the 2024 National Endowment for the Humanities Rome Prize at the American Academy in Rome and the 2025 CRIA Fellowship from I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies.

Williams received her Ph.D and M.A. in art and architectural history and her B.A. in art history from the University of Virginia.