Léon Rochard (he/they) is a Doctor of Art History of the Universities of Geneva (Switzerland) and Lille (France). His PhD, defended in 2024 and soon to be published, demonstrates the importance of the notions of cleanliness and dirtiness in seventeenth-century Netherlandish painting for choices of subject matter and technique, consumption practices, and art theory. He has held several lecturing positions at the Universities of Lille, Geneva, Leiden, and Poitiers, and is now teaching at Sorbonne-Université.
He joined the project in November 2025 as a postdoctoral researcher, working on the role of women’s artistic patronage in their agency over the present in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Low Countries. By confronting the framework of gender studies with an investigation into plural experiences of the present, he hopes to shed further light on questions of agency and intersectionality in research on gender in the early modern era. His research currently focuses on Margaret of Parma (1522–1586), benefiting from growing interest in her patronage as governor of the Netherlands. It aims to contribute to current knowledge of Margaret as a patron while also drawing connections between her politics and these artworks, and determining, when possible, her level of involvement in artistic commissions.