Elizabeth McCahill
Chair, History Department
Phone: 617.287.6843
Biography
Professor McCahill received her PhD from Princeton. After a year at the American Academy in Rome, she joined UMB's History department in 2009. Professor McCahill's research focuses on humanism, the Renaissance papacy, patronage, ritual/ ceremony, rhetoric and classical reception. Her new book, Pope Leo X and Papal Authority on the Eve of the Reformation, is forthcoming from Oxford in October, 2026. She is currently serving as chair of the History Department.
Area of Expertise
Professor McCahill’s research interests include the medieval and Renaissance reception of the classical legacy, patronage and institutional history, humanism, the papacy, and the city of Rome. She teaches undergraduate classes on Europe prior to 1700 and graduate courses on early modern European cultural history. Most recently, she has been developing classes on propaganda, an interest that developed in the course of writing her book on Pope Leo X.
Degrees
Yale, BA in Humanities
Princeton, MA, PhD in History
Professional Publications & Contributions
Constructing a Renaissance Pope: Rhetoric, Ceremony, and Authority in the Age of Leo X (1513–1521) (Oxford, 2026).
“Papal Patronage and the Reception of Classicism in Medieval and Renaissance Rome.” In Cambridge History of the Papacy, Volume 3: Society and Culture. eds. Miles Pattenden and Joëlle Rollo-Koster. Cambridge, 2025.
“Letters to the Editor: Friendship and Self-Fashioning in a Fifteenth Century Humanist Epistolary Collection." Renaissance Quarterly 76 (2023): 408-443.
“The Stanza dell’Incendio and the Ideological Agenda of Pope Leo X,” in Revisiting Raphael’s Vatican Stanze, eds. Kim Butler Wingfield and Tracy Cosgriff. Turnhout: Harvey Miller, 2022.
“Humanism Between Medieval and Renaissance.” In New Horizons in Early Modern European Scholarship, eds. Ann Blair and Nicholas Popper, 15-30. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021.
“Civility and Secularism in the Ambit of the Papal Court.” In After Civic Humanism, eds. Nicholas Baker and Brian Maxson, 131-151. Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2015.
Reviving the Eternal City: Rome and the Papal Court, 1420-1447. Harvard University Press, 2013.
“Rewriting Vergil, Rereading Rome: Maffeo Vegio, Poggio Bracciolini, Flavio Biondo and early Quattrocento Antiquarianism.” Memoirs of the American Academy 54 (2009): 165-199.
“Finding a Job as a Humanist: the Epistolary Collection of Lapo da Castiglionchio the Younger.” Renaissance Quarterly 57 (2004): 1308-1345.