Derek Scott Burdette
(PhD, Art History and Latin American Studies, Tulane University) is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Oregon. His research explores the connections between art, religion, and colonialism in the Spanish viceroyalties. His current book project, Miraculous Celebrity: The History of Wonder-Working Images in Baroque Mexico City, examines the role that miraculous imagery played in the colonial capital during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He is also currently researching the connection between sacred imagery and print culture in the colonial Americas and the politics of nineteenth-century history painting and their role in shaping the narrative of the conquest of Mexico.
Catherine Burdick
(PhD, Art History, University of Illinois–Chicago) is formerly a researcher with the Centro del Patrimonio Cultural at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, and is currently an instructor in the Centro’s Magister de Patrimonio. She has published articles on two-dimensional works of colonial Chile, including “Patagonian Cinnamon and Pepper” (Imago Mundi, 2014) and “The Remedies of the Machi” (
Heather Graham
(PhD, Art History, University of California–Los Angeles) is Assistant Professor of Art History at California State University, Long Beach. Her research and publications explore Italian Renaissance art as it intersects with the history of the body and of the emotions, early modern medicine, mourning behaviors and death, gender and sexual culture, and religion. Her current book project traces the development of grief imagery through the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, focusing on how images of ritualized mourning fulfilled their devotional and social functions by engaging viewers’ bodies. She is Co-Director of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at
Tiffany Lynn Hunt
(PhD candidate, Art History, Tyler School of Art, Temple University) is a Samuel H. Kress Foundation pre-doctoral Institutional Fellow at the Bibliotheca Hertziana-Max-Planck-Institut für Kunstgeschichte in Rome, Italy. Her research focuses on pre- and post-Tridentine images and the development of Roman maniera. Her current project, entitled “Negotiating Michelangelo in the Vatican Palace, 1542–1585,” explores the fresco programs by Michelangelo Buonarroti, Lorenzo Sabatini, and Federico Zuccaro within the Pauline Chapel commissioned by Pope Paul iii Farnese and Pope Gregory xiii Boncampagni.
Lauren G. Kilroy-Ewbank
(PhD, Art History, University of California–Los Angeles) is Associate Professor of Art History at Pepperdine University. She has published articles on devotional art in colonial Mexico, the first self-portraits in the Spanish Americas by Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, and digital art history pedagogy. Her forthcoming book, Holy Organ or Unholy Idol? The Sacred Heart in the Art, Religion, and Politics of Bourbon New Spain, explores eighteenth-century devotion to the Heart of Jesus. Topics of her latest research include failed attempts by the Mexican Inquisition to censor devotional prints, Michelangelesque imagery in sixteenth-century Mexico, and the idea of a Catholic Enlightenment in Hispanic art. She is a content editor, author, and board member for Smarthistory.org.
Walter S. Melion
(PhD, Art History, University of California–Berkeley) is Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Art History at Emory University in Atlanta, where he directs the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry. He has published extensively on Dutch and Flemish art and art theory of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, on Jesuit image-theory, on the relation between theology and aesthetics in the early modern period, and on the artist Hendrick Goltzius. In addition to monographs on Jerónimo Nadal’s Adnotationes et meditationes in Evangelia (2003–2007) and on scriptural illustration in the sixteenth-century Low Countries (2009), his books include Shaping the Netherlandish Canon: Karel van Mander’s ‘Schilder-Boeck’ (1991) and The Meditative Art: Studies in the Northern Devotional Print, 1550–1625 (2009). He is co-editor of fifteen volumes, most recently Personification: Embodying Meaning and Emotion (2016); Jesuit Image Theory (2016); and Ut pictura amor: The Reflexive Imagery of Love in Artistic Theory and Practice, 1400–1700 (2017). He was elected Foreign Member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2010.
Ruth Noyes
(PhD, Art History, Johns Hopkins University) undertakes research that attends to early modern transdisciplinary borderlands at the thresholds of hetero-orthodoxy, imbricating material culture, the numinous, and nascent episteme, and plotting these in trans-cultural, -historical, and -global contexts. Her monograph, Peter Paul Rubens and the Counter-Reformation Crisis of the Beati moderni (Routledge, Sanctity in Global Perspective Series, 2017), interrogates the formation of recent saints in the new environment of increased censorship that developed after the Council of Trent with respect to legal canonization procedures and cultic devotion to the saints. She is completing a second monograph, Blood & Fire/Ray & Curve: Engraving as Embodied Art and Science ca. 1600 (Brill, Nuncius Series) and preparing a third, Translatio: (Re)moving Relics and Reforming Holiness in the Early Modern World.
Emmanuel Ortega
(PhD, Art History, University of New Mexico) has lectured nationally and internationally on the topics of images of autos-da-fe, nineteenth-century landscape painting, and visual representations of Pueblo peoples in Novohispanic Franciscan martyr paintings. Springing from his research interests, Ortega has curated in Mexico and the United States. In 2015, he partnered with the Museo de Arte Religioso Ex-Convento de Santa Mónica in Puebla, Mexico, to curate two art exhibitions based on recently restored paintings from their permanent collection, one of which is now part of their permanent exhibits.
Itay Sapir
(PhD, Art history, University of Amsterdam and École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales [
Allie Terry-Fritsch
(PhD, Art History, University of Chicago) is Associate Professor of Italian Renaissance Art History at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. Her research focuses on the performative experience of art and architecture in fifteenth-century Florence, with a particular emphasis on the political significance of the engagement of the body in the viewing process. She is editor of Beholding Violence in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Ashgate, 2012), and has recently completed a book manuscript entitled, Somaesthetic Experience and the Renaissance Viewer: Art and Political Persuasion in Medicean Florence, 1459–1580. Her next book project, Politics on the Cloister Walls: Cosimo de’ Medici, Fra Angelico, and the Library of San Marco, is in progress with the support of the National Endowment for Humanities.
Peter Weller
(PhD, Art History, University of California–Los Angeles) is an independent scholar. His research concerns images of violence, gender, and the bridge between early Renaissance art and humanism. His essay, “Donatello’s Bronze David: An Icon in the Twenty-First Century” for Artibus et Historiae (2012), addresses that statue’s modern sexual complexion. Papers delivered at the Renaissance Society of America and Sixteenth Century Society have traced river god iconography. His current book project is Alberti in Exile: Early Sources of Leon Battista Alberti’s ‘De pictura’. He is a continuous supporter of Save Venice and the recent restoration project Santa Maria e San Donato, and has served on the Board of Directors for the American wing of the Uffizi Museum art restoration.