Yvonne Owens, PhD

Yvonne Owens is a past Research Fellow at the University College of London, and Professor Emeritus of Art History and Critical Studies at the Victoria College of Art, Victoria, BC. She was awarded a Marie Curie Ph.D. Fellowship in 2005 for her interdisciplinary dissertation on Renaissance portrayals of women in art and sixteenth-century Witch Hunt discourses. She holds an Honours B.A. with Distinctions in History of Art from the University of Victoria, British Columbia, an M.A. in Medieval Studies with Distinction from The Centre For Medieval Studies at the University of York, U.K., and an M.Phil. and Ph.D. in History of Art from University College of London. Her publications to date have mainly focused on representations of women and the gendering of evil "defect" in classical humanist discourses, cross-referencing these figures to historical art, natural philosophy, medicine, theology, science and literature. Her essay, “The Saturnine History of Jews and Witches,” appeared in Preternature (Vol. 3, No. 1) in 2014, her book chapter, "Pollution and Desire in Hans Baldung Grien: The Abject, Erotic Spell of the Witch and Dragon" appeared in Angeliki Pollali and Berthold Hub, Eds., Images of Sex and Desire in Renaissance Art and Modern Historiography, her essay "The Hags, Harridans, Viragos and Crones of Hans Baldung Grien" was published as part of the Hans Baldung Grien: New perspectives on his work, International Conference Proceedings (October 18-20, 2018), Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe in 2019, and her book, Abject Eroticism in Northern Renaissance Art: the Witches and Femme Fatales of Hans Baldung Grien, Bloomsbury London, in 2020. She also writes art and cultural criticism, exploring contemporary post-humanist discourses in art, literature and new media. She is Editor for an anthology of essays titled Trans-Disciplinary Migrations: Science, the Sacred, and the Arts, published in 2024 by Cambridge Scholars Publishing.