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PAROMA CHATTERJEE, University of Michigan
Paroma Chatterjee did a BA in French at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi and another in History of Art at the University of Cambridge. She earned her PhD at the University of Chicago in 2007 and was Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, from 2009. A specialist in Byzantine art, she works on artistic networks between Byzantium and the Latin West from the 11th to the 13th century. She has recently completed a book manuscript entitled Living Icons: Saints and Representation in Byzantium and Italy, 11th-13th centuries and is currently working on a project on sculpture in medieval romance. Recent articles have appeared in such journals as Art History, Word & Image, and The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies.
ZIRWAT CHOWDHURY, Reed College
Zirwat Chowdhury is Visiting Assistant Professor of Art History and the Humanities at Reed College. Her research explores the inter-connected visual and material cultures of Britain and South Asia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She received her Ph.D. from Northwestern University in 2012, and was Ahmanson-Getty Postdoctoral Fellow at the UCLA Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies and the Clark Library (2012-2013).
MEREDITH MARTIN, New York University
Meredith Martin’s work focuses on 18th- and 19th-Century French and British art, architecture, material culture, and landscape design; art and gender politics, cross-cultural encounters in European art; interiors and identity; historical revivalism and contemporary art. She is the author of Dairy Queens: The Politics of Pastoral Architecture from Catherine de’ Medici to Marie-Antoinette (Harvard University Press, 2011).
BARBARA E. MUNDY, Fordham University
Barbara E. Mundy is Professor of Art History and specializes in Latin American art with particular emphasis on indigenous art and cartography of the 16th century. Her first book, The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geográficas (University of Chicago, 1996) was winner of the 1996 Nebenzahl Prize in the History of Cartography. A co-edited volume, Painting a Map of Sixteenth-Century Mexico City: Land, Writing and Native Rule (2012) sheds light on a rare map of Mexico City.
A pioneering digital work, Vistas: Visual Culture in Spanish America, 1520-1820, was co-authored with Dana Leibsohn and published in DVD format by the University of Texas Press in 2010. A new book, The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, the Life of Mexico City, centers on Tenochtitlan-Mexico City and its transformation from the sacred capital of the Aztecs into the center of Spain’s overseas empire. It is forthcoming with University of Texas Press in July, 2015.
BENJAMIN PAUL, Rutgers University
Benjamin Paul is a specialist in Italian Renaissance art, focusing on Venetian architecture and painting of the early 16th century. His recent publications include the book Nuns and Reform Art in Early Modern Venice: The Architecture of Santi Cosma e Damiano and its Decoration from Tintoretto to Tiepolo (London, 2012) and the edited volume Celebrazione e autocritica. La Serenissima e la ricerca dell’identità veneziana nel tardo Cinquecento (Rome, 2014). Paul is also working on the tombs of the doges of Venice, on which he is currently editing a volume with the proceedings of a conference he organized. His next book project deals with Venetian art in the aftermath of the Battle of Lepanto (1571) and is entitled “The Agency of Art in the Crisis of Late Sixteenth-Century Venice.”
Paul is also a critic writing on contemporary art in journals such as Artforum and Springerin. He also curated Wolfgang Tillmans: Still life (exh. cat., Harvard University Art Museums, 2002), the first solo exhibition of the German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans in the US.
TARA ZANARDI, Hunter College
Tara Zanardi teaches courses on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European art that consider a wide range of topics, such as art and politics, the development of museums, national identities and cultural representations, fashion, gender, and global exchange. Her expertise and research interests cover the visual and material culture of Spain. She has published articles in Material Culture Review, The Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Dieciocho, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, and Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture. Her first book-length manuscript, Majismo and the Pictorial Construction of Spanish Elite Identity in Eighteenth Century, is forthcoming from Pennsylvania State University Press (2016).
Her current work includes two book-length manuscripts. The first, Fashioning Identities: Types, Dress, and Customs in a Global Context anthology, co-edited with Lynda Klich, seeks to give voice to a form of representation that has been largely marginalized, despite its long history, and debunks the usual classification of typological images as unmediated and authentic representations of a people and their practices. The second book-length manuscript, tentatively titled, Artful Politics: The Chinese Porcelain Room at Aranjuez and the Shaping of Bourbon Identity, is currently in preparation. In this book, she will explore the connections among porcelain, botany, identity, and politics under Charles III (1759-88).
Zanardi received her MA and PhD from the University of Virginia. She has held previous teaching posts at Roger Williams University, Appalachian State University, and the University of Virginia.