Laura L. Watts (MA, 1993; PhD, 1999) is a Professor at Daemen University in Amherst, New York. Her publishing credits include "Italian Romanticism and Academicism in an Unidentified Rest on the Flight into Egypt" for Gazette des Beaux Arts (2002); "Shifting Identities: Politics, Poetry and Passion in Italian Nineteenth-Century Portraiture" for Visual Resources (2007), and "Regionalism and Ruskin in the Ottocento Art Historical Narrative," a chapter in the 2012 anthology Ruskin, Venice and Cultural Tourism.  Her book Italian Painting in the Age of Unification (2021, Routledge) won the Visual Arts Book Award from the American Association of Italian Studies in 2022.  She is currently teaching and developing a visual literacy curriculum for Daemen University from her home in Bermuda.