Current Faculty

Zamansele Nsele

Assistant Professor
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

Professor
Early Modern Art

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...

Lisa Pieraccini

Continuing Lecturer
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...

Sugata Ray

Associate Professor
South and Southeast Asian Art

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...