Bio

Jessica Stair (PhD 2018) specializes in the visual culture of colonial Latin America. She was co-advised by Todd Olson and Lisa Trever. Her dissertation “Indigenous Literacies in the Techialoyan Manuscripts of New Spain” considers a corpus of Central Mexican community documents in which late-colonial artists and scribes invented new iconographies and modes of reading and writing that derived from pre-Columbian, early colonial, and European traditions. She is currently a Mellon Postdoctoral Research Associate affiliated with the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Brown University. Her current research centers on the transformation of pictorial forms across genre and media within late-colonial, indigenous documents known as primordial titles.