The Glasscock Center is excited to continue its series which highlights humanities research at Texas A&M, and the vital role played by the humanities at the university and in the world beyond the academy.

For this highlight, we invite Dr. Tianna Helena Uchacz to tell us about her experience as a Glasscock Center Faculty Research Fellow (2021–2022) and about the Fall 2023 conference she organized with the support from the Glasscock Center. 

Dr. Tianna Helena Uchacz is an Assistant Professor with the Visualization Program in the College of Performance, Visualization and Fine Arts and an Arts and Humanities Fellow with the Division of Research at Texas A&M University. Dr. Uchacz is an art historian specializing in early modern Netherlandish art and craft technology. Her forthcoming article in the history of science journal Centaurus, “Reading Between the Lines: Ornament Prints as Technical Literature,” argues that we should see ornament prints as the “visual analogues of recipe texts.”

Dr. Uchacz currently co-convenes the Early Modern Studies Glasscock Center Humanities Research Working Group, which provides a space for scholars studying the global early modern period, broadly defined as 1450-1800 CE. Working groups are thematically organized forums that provide space for in-depth discussion and foster interdisciplinary exchanges for both faculty and graduate students. 

Dr. Uchacz received a Glasscock Center Faculty Research Fellowship for 2021–22. Her project focused on ornament prints created from 1540 to 1620. Ornament prints are woodcuts, engravings, and etchings featuring decorative patterns for reference and replication; they were sometimes issued as a series with a title page which may contain details such as claims of the print’s utility for named artistic professions. 

“The essential research question is, if these ornament prints were useful to the variety of practicing artists that are often named by profession on the title pages, in what way were they useful?” She says. “Was it just about the formal utility or is there something more that can be gleaned - especially by the combination of particular artists that are being referenced.”

With the fellowship, Dr. Uchacz traveled to the British Museum, the Victoria & Albert Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art to examine print collections. She plans to publish the archived materials she collected in a database created with assistance from the Center of Digital Humanities Research (CoDHR) and additional support from a Texas A&M Arts and Humanities Fellowship. Additionally, Dr. Uchacz is partnering with contemporary artists to understand how the prints can be translated into different mediums such as various metals, glass, embroidery, or stone. 

“Artists read these prints differently,” she says. “My artist collaborators suggest that features in the prints that an art historian interprets as mere formal flourishes might, for instance, hint at ways to assemble composite pieces or be visual clues and cues that are only really legible to somebody with the right kind of artistic and materials-based knowledge.”

Understanding the furnace technologies that were critical to many of the artisanal processes used by artisan professions named in the ornament print series’ title pages became key for Dr. Uchacz. “It seemed incumbent upon me to understand the technologies first as a way to then think about the making processes,” she says. This past year, Dr. Uchacz received a Symposium and Small Conference Grant from the Glasscock Center to support a research event she organized called “Fire Arts: Pasts & Futures.” The event, which took place at the Texas A&M University, from November 6th to November 8th, 2023, invited international artists and historians of art, science, and technology to reconstruct three historical furnaces: a pre-Hispanic Colombian guaira, an early modern European goldsmith furnace, and an early modern European distillation furnace. The furnaces were built based on an amalgamation of references such as text, illustrations, and later-developed furnace technologies from the 18th and 19th centuries.

“The Glasscock Center was critical to making this possible because without it I wouldn't have had the capacity to bring in expert scholars from so many different countries and institutions, which was incredibly generative,” she says. “But more important than that, I think, is the fact that the Center supported this imaginative project, which was quite exploratory…we all had a sense of what we were going to build and why, but we couldn't have foreseen the insights we would gain by actually running these different furnaces next to one another.” Fire Arts participants are preparing a double special issue of Ambix, a journal of the history of alchemy and chemistry, to appear in early 2026.

Many of the outside scholars and artists invited to participate in the Fire Arts research event are members of a multidisciplinary materials research group called Active Matter which focuses on developing and supporting regenerative artist-scholar collaborative projects informed by past artisanal practices and knowledge systems. “We are invested in trying to see how the recovery of past technologies might reinvigorate our ideas of ways towards sustainable futures,” Dr. Uchacz says.

For Dr. Uchacz, an important takeaway from the Fire Arts research event was the ability to showcase the different ways of knowing and how bringing those different perspectives together yields richer interpretations.

“Fire Arts helps to make the case for the fruitfulness of both collaborative approaches in the humanities and also materials based approaches,” she says. “It broadens not just what we think of as ways of knowing but also what the humanities can be and what investigative methods it might use.”