Trained as an architect and art historian, Professor Payne is a scholar of late medieval and early modern architecture, art theory, and the historiography of art, focusing upon the Italian and Mediterranean worlds. She is a recipient of the Alexander von Humboldt Prize in the Humanities, and will deliver the Chaire de Louvre lectures in Paris in 2016. Among her publications are The Architectural Treatise in the Italian Renaissance (Cambridge University Press, 1999), The Telescope and the Compass: Teofilo Gallaccini and the Dialogue between Architecture and Science in the Age of Galileo (Leo Olschki, 2012), and Vision and Its Instruments: Art, Science, and Technology in Early Modern Europe (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015).