Laura Eliza Enríquez is a student in the Humanities Ph.D. program at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture (CISSC) at Concordia University, Montreal. Her research focuses on the cultural and intellectual history of the sense of taste, its representation in the early modern visual and material culture from the Low Countries, and the connections between gustatory experience, painting and the making of knowledge. She works under the direction of David Howes (CISSC), Steven Stowell (Art History), Angela Vanhaelen (Art History & Communication Studies, McGill University), and David Morris (Philosophy).

Laura holds an MA in Art History, Curatorship and Renaissance Culture from the Warburg Institute, in collaboration with the National Gallery, London. Her dissertation was entitled “The Third Mouth: Praising the Sense of Taste in Early Modern Painting in the Low Countries”. It was supervised by Joanne Anderson (Warburg Institute) and co-supervised by Francesca Whitlam-Cooper (National Gallery, London). In her thesis, Laura argued for the representation of taste as a faculty of judgment, in the Dutch and Flemish tradition of kitchen and market scenes. Laura’s first degree was in Philosophy (Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City) as well as Liberal Arts and Sciences (University College Maastricht, The Netherlands). 

From 2018 to 2021, Laura served as the Coordinator of Concordia’s Centre for Sensory Studies. She teaches the course ARTH 365 – Studies in 17th and 18th-Century Art and Architecture: “Selected Themes in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Painting,” (Art History, Concordia University) which explores current historiographic trends, including materiality and the senses, artisanal epistemologies, and the global turn, while addressing questions of representation, race and multiculturalism.

Laura has published reviews of multisensory exhibitions, such as Somerset House’s “Perfume: A Sensory Journey through Contemporary Scent” (March 2018), and her latest publication, an exhibition review of the V&A “Food: Bigger than the Plate,” appeared in the journal The Senses and Society in June 2021.