The 2016-17 Art History Graduate Student Lecture Series at the University of Delaware continues this semester with an opening talk by Andrea Pearson of American University at 5 p.m., Tuesday, Feb. 21, in 123 Memorial Hall.

Pearson’s lecture, “Sensory Piety as Social Intervention in a Mechelen Besloten Hofje,” like the other talks in the series, is free and open to the public. The theme of the series, which began last fall, is “Labor, Movement, Experience: New Directions in Art History.”

Pearson will examine a besloten hofje (“enclosed garden”), a kind of prayer tool, to explore 16th-century devotional practices that were mediated through art and the senses. The lecture will discuss the relationship among sensory piety, physical disability, monastic reform and the gendered practice of enclosure.

An associate professor of art history at American University in Washington, D.C., Pearson is noted for her revisionist publications on art and gender in the early modern Netherlands, particularly issues of social marginalization, same-sex desire and physical disability.

She has edited Women and Portraits in Early Modern Europe (Ashgate, 2008) and published Envisioning Gender in Burgundian Devotional Art, 1350-1530: Experience, Authority, Resistance (Ashgate, 2005).

Two other lectures in the series this semester, both also in 123 Memorial, are:

The William I. Homer Lecture, 5:30 p.m., Thursday, March 16. Britt Salvesen, curator and head of the Wallis Annenberg Photography Department and Prints and Drawings Department of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, will speak about “Mapplethorpe Now.”

The Wayne Craven Lecture, 5:30 p.m., Tuesday, April 25. Glenn Adamson, an independent curator and writer based in New York City and senior scholar at the Yale Center for British Art, will lecture on “Production Values: Narratives of Making in Contemporary Art.”

Those attending a lecture are asked to register. For information about the series and how to register, visit the website.