Morgan Ng

Morgan Ng is assistant professor of art history at Yale University. He studies the history of architecture, landscape, and visual culture, specializing in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy and its global networks. His scholarship is especially concerned with the polymathic nature of early modern creativity, exploring technical practices now considered separate from the fine arts but once central to artistic labor.

A driving concern of his research is the conceptualization and interpretation of what he terms “cognate technologies”: artifacts often distinct in style and function yet connected by deep formal and structural kinships. This project coalesces in his first book Form and Fortification: The Art of Military Architecture in Renaissance Italy, due for publication by Yale University Press in early 2025. The study probes the close morphological resemblances between fortifications and other works of sixteenth-century art and design: palaces, gardens, and urban infrastructure.

Much of Ng’s research strives to bridge the medieval and early modern scholarly divide. This ambition motivates his current book project, which traces the survival and transformation of earlier graphic techniques in the emergent Renaissance practice of architectural drawing on paper. Research toward this project has recently been supported by Membership at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

Before entering academia, Ng worked as an architect in New York and Chicago.

For more on his work: morganng.com

Photo credit: Andrea Kane, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton