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 also below-the-line affiliated with the African American Studies & African Diaspora Studies department.
Nsele is currently finalizing her first monograph, provisionally titled “Post-apartheid Nostalgias: Archival Art and the Figuration of the Black Subject”. In this work, she interrogates how restorative nostalgias generate visual epistemologies that sanitize, disavow, and aestheticize oppressive racial histories—challenging the conventional view of nostalgia as merely...
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. She taught and conducted research in Rome and southern Etruria for several years. Her interests in ancient Mediterranean art reflect global and cross disciplinary approaches to understanding the past. Issues related to decolonization and indigeneity as well as reception studies, digital humanities, cultural heritage and antiquity in film are just some of the subjects explored in her courses. Dr. Pieraccini has published a variety of articles and book chapters on a wide...
Indigenous Art and Archaeology of the Ancestral Americas; Colonial Latin American Art
Juliana Ramírez Herrera specializes in the arts and archaeology of the Indigenous Americas, particularly those of the so-called small-scale societies from pre-Conquest and early colonial Panama, Colombia, the Caribbean, and Amazonia. Her work engages with the spatio-temporal dislocations that have brought Indigenous material culture into contact with Western art historical and archaeological discourses. She is particularly interested in historiography, collecting practices, museums, and the ethical challenges of researching and teaching primarily looted material. Her research examines...
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 is on post-1400s art and architecture in South Asia with a focus on climate change and the environment, postcolonial geophilosophy, and posthumanist thought before colonial modernity. His first book Climate Change and the Art of Devotion: Geoaesthetics in the Land of Krishna, 1550–...
