Margaretta M. Lovell is a cultural historian working at the intersection of history, art/architectural history, and anthropology. She holds the Jay D. McEvoy, Jr., Chair in the History of American Art at U. C. Berkeley, and studies material culture, painting, architecture, and design in England, France, and North America from the seventeenth century to the present. She received her PhD in American Studies at Yale, and has taught as Visiting Professor in the History of Art departments at Stanford, Harvard, and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Having begun her teaching career at Yale,...
Arts and Visual Cultures of Africa and the African Diaspora
Ivy Mills teaches courses on African arts and visual cultures in the History of Art Department at the University of California, Berkeley; she also serves as the department’s Reading and Composition Program Coordinator. Trained in African Diaspora Studies at UC Berkeley, she has lived in Paris, France and Dakar, Senegal, where she conducted Fulbright-funded research on Senegalese cultural production and taught university courses. She has ongoing research projects in Senegal and Nigeria on contemporary works that engage with questions of social exclusion and gender asymmetries in religious...
Modern and Contemporary African & African Diasporic Art
Zamansele Nsele is Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary African & African Diasporic Art. She is currently working on her first monograph, provisionally titled, “Reckoning with Post-Apartheid & Imperialist Nostalgias in Archival Art Practice in Africa”. In the monograph, Zamansele Nsele explores how nostalgia can generate visual epistemologies that sanitize, disavow, and aestheticize oppressive racial histories— despite nostalgia’s conventional significance as an affective structure that affirms Black social life. One of the central themes that is...
Todd Olson is the author of Poussin and France: Painting, Humanism and the Politics of Style (Yale University Press, 2002) and Caravaggio’s Pitiful Relics (Yale University Press, 2014). His fields of research and teaching include early modern Europe, colonial Latin America, and the trans-Atlantic world. His main areas of interest are class and sexuality in visual representation, transcultural materiality, history of art criticism and theory, and the politics of collecting. He has two books in progress: Survivals: The Migration and Transmission of Graphic Media in...
The Material Culture of the Ancient Mediterranean, Etruscan and Roman Art
Lisa C. Pieraccini works on the material culture of the ancient Mediterranean with special emphasis on ancient Italy (namely, the Etruscans and Romans). She lived in Italy for many years where she taught and conducted research in Rome and southern Etruria. Her interests include ancient Mediterranean artistic exchange, craft connectivity, funeral art and ritual as well as decolonization and indigeneity. She also works on reception studies and the shifting constructs of identity in the visual programs of ancient and neoclassical monuments. Dr. Pieraccini has published a variety of articles...
Trained in both history (Presidency College; Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta) and art history (Maharaja Sayajirao University, Baroda; University of Minnesota), Sugata Ray’s research focuses on the intersections among early modern and colonial artistic cultures, transterritorial ecologies, and the natural environment. His first book, Climate Change and the Art of Devotion: Geoaesthetics in the Land of Krishna, 1550–1850 (2019, awarded the American Academy of Religion’s Religion and the Arts Book Award), examined the interrelationship between matter and life in...