Sofia Hernandez, M.Phil.

Sofia Hernandez is a doctoral candidate at Princeton University, working under the supervision of Professors Carolyn Yerkes and Basile Baudez. She is an architectural historian of the early modern Mediterranean, focusing on Italian architecture and urbanism. Her research investigates the relationship between architecture, political power, and natural disaster in Spanish Italy. Her dissertation focuses on the rebuilding of eastern Sicily after the earthquake of 1693, and the response of the Spanish Crown. More broadly, her research deals with cultural exchanges between Spain and Sicily throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Since 2023, Sofia has been a contributing author to The Digital Piranesi, a developing digital humanities project that aims to provide an enhanced online edition of the works of Italian illustrator, Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778). Alongside a group of interdisciplinary and international scholars, Sofia is writing catalog entries for Piranesi’s views of volume one of Le Antichità Romane (1756). Sofia received her B.A. in art history from Columbia University (2019). She is currently the Princeton pre-doctoral research fellow in the Department of Prof. Dr. Tanja Michalsky at the Bibliotheca Hertziana.