Alina Payne is Professor of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University. She was trained as an architect (BArch, McGill University) and received MA and PhD degrees in art/architecture history (University of Toronto). She is the author of The Architectural Treatise in the Italian Renaissance (Cambridge University Press, 1999; Hitchcock Prize, 2000), Rudolf Wittkower (Bollati Boringhieri editore, 2011), From Ornament to Object. Genealogies of Architectural Modernism (Yale University Press, forthcoming 2012), The Telescope and the Compass. Teofilo Gallaccini and the Dialogue between Architecture and Science in the Age of Galileo (Leo Olschki, 2011); editor of Displacements. Architecture and the Other Side of the Known (2000) and co-editor of Antiquity and Its Interpreters (2000). She is currently researching her next book on Renaissance architecture and materiality and preparing edited volumes on Vision and Its Instruments, Portable Archaeology and the Poetics of Influence: Croatia and the Mediterranean, and Urban Artefacts: Triumphal Arches and the paragone between the Arts. She has published numerous articles on Renaissance and modern architecture, on historiography and artistic theory. Most recently she was awarded the Max Planck and Alexander von Humboldt Prize in the Humanities (2006).

Alina Payne teaches courses on Early Modern and Modern European architecture. She has taught at Oberlin College and University of Toronto and she has held visiting appointments at the GSD, Harvard University, Villa I Tatti, Florence, Kunsthistorisches/ Max Planck Institut Florence, École Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Paris and Hertziana/ Max Planck Institute, Rome. She has served on the Board of Directors of the Society of Architectural Historians and as Book Review Editor of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians and serves currently on the editorial boards of several international journals (Res. Journal of Aesthetics and Anthropology, Journal of Historiography) and on several international juries.