Alessandra Russo is Professor and Chair of the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures and Director of the Hispanic Institute at Columbia University, where she teaches and studies the theory, practice and display of the arts in the Early Modern times. She is author of the books A New Antiquity (2024, 2025 Eleanor Tufts Award), The Untranslatable Image (2014; French edition: L'image intraduisible, 2013), El realismo circular (2005), and co-editor of Images Take Flight (2015). Her essays have appeared in numerous volumes and journals such Res, the Art Bulletin, the Journal of the History of Collections, and October. She curated with Gerhard Wolf and Diana Fane the exhibition El vuelo de las imágenes and collaborated with Serge Gruzinski in the curatorship of Planète Métisse. Professor Russo is presently working on The Great Custodian. Sebastiano Biavati, Curator of a New Artistic World.

Bianca de Divitiis (1974) is Associate Professor in History of Art at the University of Naples Federico II (from 2013). She is also Principal Investigator of the ERC five years project (2011-2016) entitled “Historical Memory, Antiquarian Culture, Artistic Patronage: Social Identities of the Centres of Southern Italy between the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period”. She has studied Architecture at the University of Naples “Federico II” (2001) and achieved a Ph.D. in History of Architecture at the School of Advanced Studies in Venice (2006). She was awarded post-doctoral fellowships from The Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and Architecture (2001, 2002, 2007), the Francis Haskell Memorial Fund (2006), the IUAV University in Venice (2006-2007; 2010-2011) , The Warburg Institute (2007), Villa I Tatti – Havard Centre for the Studies in Italian Renaissance Studies (2009-2010). She has organized international conferences and seminars and has published several articles in peer-reviewed journals (JSAH 2015, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschicte 2013; JWCI 2007, 2010; Art History 2007; The Burlington Magazine 2003). She has published a book entitled Architettura e committenza nella Napoli del Quattrocento,  (Marsilio, Venezia 2007) and is currently working on a book entitled Rinascimento e il Regno. Memoria storica, cultura antiquaria, committenza artistica nei centri dell’Italia meridionale (Viella, Rome) to be published in 2017.

Daniel Dolin is a second-year PhD candidate in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia, working on painting in seventeenth-century Naples. Daniel graduated from the University of Western Australia in 2016, with a thesis on the battle scenes of Aniello Falcone and Salvator Rosa. He continues to work on genre painting, the representation of war, and the art of southern Italy.

Darío Velandia Onofre is Associate Professor and Director of the Art History Department at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá. He graduated in Literature from the Universidad de los Andes (2008) and received his Ph.D. in Art History from the Universitat de Barcelona (2014). His publications explore the use and function of sacred imagery in diverse territories of the Spanish monarchy during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In his research, he has taken a particular interest in an interdisciplinary methodology, evaluating the ways in which different types of literary sources (sacred oratory, artistic literature, mystical poetry, treatises on prayer, among others) condition the visual culture of the period. He is the author of Destrucción y culto: políticas de la imagen sagrada en América y España (1563-1700) (2021) and has published articles in peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes (Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures 2025, Ediciones Uniandes 2022, Brill 2021, Word and Image 2018, H-ART 2018, Hispania Sacra 2017, Perifrasis 2012).

Elsaris Núñez Méndez holds a Ph.D. in Art History with a primary field in Viceregal Arts from the College of Philosophy and Letters at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), where she completed her dissertation entitled “Oración, virtud y sacerdocio. La capilla del Ochavo en la Catedral de Puebla”. Núñez has a strong interest in the arts of seventeenth-century Puebla (Mexico) and its relationship with broader artistic and religious dynamics developing in the Hispanic world, including those concerning the sensory cultivation of an intimate spirituality through the integration of the arts in ornamented architectural spaces. She was a pre-doctoral fellow of the National Council of Science and Technology of Mexico (CONACYT) (2014-2018) and of the College of Arts & Sciences at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2010-2012), where she obtained her Master’s degree. She was a curatorial assistant at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston for the exhibition Made in the Americas. The New World Discovers Asia (2015). She is co-author of the book La Catedral de Puebla. Una mirada (2015), and has produced articles and chapters for specialized publications and exhibition catalogues published in Mexico, Peru and Spain. Supported by UNAM and CONACYT-Foro Bilateral sobre Educación Superior, she has carried out archival and outfield research in Spain and Mexico, and the Benson Latin American Collection- University of Texas Austin, respectively. In 2017 she was nominated and accepted as member of the International Association of Art Critics-Chapter of Puerto Rico. Currently, she is a curatorial researcher at the Franz Mayer Museum in Mexico City. 

Escardiel González is Associate Professor in the Department of Art History at the Universidad de Sevilla, where she has been teaching since 2011. Her research interests focus on Image and Visual Culture in the early modern global Hispanic world: Italy, the American viceroyalties, and the Philippines (ca. 1500-1800). She has also studied relics and their relationship to art and image as well as their festive culture.

Her most recent publications include Intersecciones de la imagen religiosa en el mundo hispánico: espacio, prácticas y percepción (2019); Extraña devoción. De Reliquias y relicarios (2021), an exhibition catalogue which she co-curated in the M. N. Escultura de Valladolid; “Indigenous Angels: Hybridity and Troubled Identities in the Iberian Network”, RSJ (2019); and “The Image and Cult of Sette Arcangeli facing Roman Censorship,” in Sacred Images and Normativity, edited by Franceschini (Brepols, 2022).

Escardiel has participated in the following international research projects: “Spanish Italy and the Iberian Americas” (Columbia University, Getty Foundation), “Circulación de la Imagen en la geografía artística de la Edad moderna hispánica” (Universidad Complutense de Madrid), and “Coadjutores: artistas e ideas migrantes en la globalización ibérica” (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid).

Francisco Montes González is Associate Professor in the Art History Department of the University of Seville. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Art History Department of the University of Granada and participated in the research group “Andalucía-América: Patrimonio cultural y relaciones artísticas”. His research focuses on the study of viceregal American culture from a sociological perspective. Within this topic, he has conducted in-depth research on subjects such as artistic patronage, ritual festivals and image exchange between Spain and Latin America. He has written articles and chapters for specialized publications, presented papers at international symposia, participated in research projects, and been a visiting scholar in the United States, Mexico and Argentina. In 2015 he was awarded the prize “Cultura y Nobleza. Mecenazgo, Obra Social, Coleccionismo” from the Real Maestranza de Caballería de Sevilla and the Real Academia Sevillana de Buenas Letras. He is the author of the books Sevilla Guadalupana. Arte, historia y devoción (2015), Mecenazgo virreinal y patrocinio artístico. El ducado de Alburquerque en la Nueva España (2016), and he has edited the volume Religiosidad andaluza en América. Repertorio iconográfico (2017) and Ficciones del islam: Representaciones de lo musulmán en la cultura visual de los virreinatos americanos (2024). Finally, he is a member of the Institute of Latin American Studies at the University of Seville. 

Jesús Escobar is Charles E. and Emma H. Morrison Professor in the Humanities at Northwestern University. He teaches courses and publishes scholarship on art, architecture, and urbanism in the early modern, transoceanic Spanish Empire. Escobar is the author of two books, The Plaza Mayor and the Shaping of Baroque Madrid (Cambridge University Press, 2004) and Habsburg Madrid: Architecture and the Spanish Monarchy (Penn State University Press, 2022). Both won the Eleanor Tufts Book Award from the Society for Iberian Global Art, and both have Spanish-language editions (Editorial Nerea, 2008; Centro de Estudios Europa Hispánica, 2025). His current book project considers the late-seventeenth-century itineraries of two American-born friar-scholars, tracing their individual experiences of the built environments of Mexico, Peru, Spain, and Italy, as well as places in between. With Michael Schreffler of the University of Notre Dame, Escobar is co-author of Architecture in the Spanish World, 1500 to 1800, a book under contract with Princeton University Press. Escobar has served on the Board of the Directors of the Society of Architectural Historians and is Editor for the scholarly book series, Buildings, Landscapes, and Societies, published by Penn State University Press.

Juan Luis Burke was originally trained as an architect with a specialization in the preservation of the built heritage in his native Mexico. During the first part of his career he collaborated in the preservation of important landmarks in the city of Puebla de los Ángeles, Mexico, such as the Palafoxiana Library, which houses one of the most important rare book collections in the Americas. He has practiced architecture in Mexico, the United States, and Sweden, in projects ranging from historical preservation of differing structures and genres, to museums, schools, and private residences. He carried out his master’s and doctoral studies in History and Theory of Architecture at McGill University, earning his Ph.D. in 2017. His scholarly interests revolve around the history and theory of architecture and urbanism of the early modern to the modern periods in Mexico and Latin America, as well as its connections to Europe—in particular to Spain and Italy. He has published a number of articles, papers, and edited chapters in Spanish and English, revolving around issues of the reception of architectural and urban theory in viceregal Mexico, and other architectural and urban subjects. He is currently an assistant professor of architecture and architectural history and theory at the University of Maryland–College Park, where he teaches architecture studio and history and theory courses at the School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. 

Lia Markey (MA Syracuse University in Florence 2001; MA University of Chicago 2002; Ph.D. University of Chicago 2008) is the Director of the Center for Renaissance Studies at the Newberry Library in Chicago, where she is responsible for conferences, symposia, workshops, seminars, and digital humanities projects devoted to medieval and early modern studies. Dr. Markey’s research examines cross-cultural exchange between Italy and the Americas in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, collecting history, early modern prints and drawings, and cartography. Publications include Imagining the Americas in Medici Florence (Penn State University Press, 2016) and a co-edited volume The New World in Early Modern Italy, 1492-1750 (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Her edited volume, Renaissance Invention: Stradanus’s “Nova Reperta” (Northwestern University Press, 2020) complemented the Newberry Library’s fall 2020 exhibition by the same title. Most recently, she co-curated the Newberry exhibition Seeing Race Before Race and co-edited a volume with the same name with Noémie Ndiaye (2023). Dr. Markey teaches at the University of Chicago and has held fellowships at the Folger Library, the Warburg Institute, Harvard's Villa I Tatti, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Herzog August Bibliothek, the European University Institute in Florence, and the Getty Museum.   

Lucía Querejazu Escobari is a historian specialized in colonial Andean painting. Currently, she is working as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Zürich within the project entitled Global Economies of Salvation. She obtained her PhD in History from the University of Buenos Aires. Her research has been supported by the Thoma Foundation (Visiting Scholar Grant 2018). Previously, she was the curator and director of the National Museum of Art in La Paz, Bolivia and the editor of the exhibition catalogue Dios y la Máquina: Serialidad y singularidad en la pintura andina colonial (2020). She contributed to The art of painting in Colonial Bolivia (2017) and to the Oxford Encyclopedia of Religion among other publications. She is a member of the Bolivian Society of History and the Association of Bolivian Studies.

Luisa Elena Alcalá is Associate Professor in the Department of the History and Theory of Art of the Universidad Autónoma of Madrid. Before moving to Spain, she studied at Yale College and obtained her PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts (New York University, 1998). Her research focuses on Latin American colonial art, especially Mexican painting of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and its relationship to issues of religious practices and experience, taste, and patronage.  An ongoing research interest has been the role of the Jesuits in Latin America as major players in an art history of circulation in the Early Modern period. Related to this, is the recent article “«…Fátiga, y cuidados, y gastos, y regalos…» Aspectos de la circulación de la escultura napolitana a ambos lados del Atlántico,” in Libros de la Corte. Monográfico 5 (2017) (https://revistas.uam.es/librosdelacorte/issue/view/678). Prof. Alcalá has held fellowships from CASVA (National Gallery, Washington DC) and Dumbarton Oaks (Harvard University). She has edited the volume Fundaciones Jesuíticas en Iberoamérica and co-edited, with Jonathan Brown, Painting in Latin America. More recently, she was one of the co-curators (along with Jaime Cuadriello, Paula Mues Orts and Ilona Katzew) of the itinerant exhibition Painted in Mexico. Pinxit Mexici, 1700-1790 held at LACMA, Fomento Cultural Banamex (Mexico City), and the MET in 2017-18. 

Maria Elisa Navarro Morales is an assistant professor at the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Trinity College Dublin. She graduated as an architect from Universidad de Los Andes in Bogotá in 1999, obtained a Masters in History and Theory of Architecture in 2006 and a PhD in 2013 both from McGill University School of Architecture.  Before joining Trinity College in 2019, Dr. Navarro Morales held teaching positions in Colombia (2014 – 2019) and Canada (2011 – 2013). She is interested in the relationship between books and buildings and in non-canonical architectural manifestations. Her research has centred around the theoretical and built work of Spanish polymath Juan Caramuel de Lobkowitz, a Seventeenth Century polymath whose work has served her as a window into the intellectual world of his time. She is particularly interested in disseminating the architectural works of this fascinating figure that despite being held high by his contemporaries has been left out of mainstream history. Dr. Navarro Morales has participated in several international events where she has successfully presented her work. She has also published some of her findings in book chapters and journals. She is currently working on the publication of a manuscript of the Architectura Natural, the unpublished volume of Caramuel's architectural treatise.

Maria Vittoria Spissu holds a PhD degree in the History of Modern Art, obtained at the University of Bologna, where she presently is a Research Fellow and has previously been an Adjunct Professor. Also, she has been a scholarship holder at the University of Sassari and at the International Studies Institute, Florence. The main topic of her research has been the altarpieces painted in the Sardinian Kingdom under the Crown of Aragon and within the Habsburg Empire, with a special focus on the connections with the Flemish-Iberian painting and southern Raphaelism. In this context, she has investigated the circulation of prints and the specific adoption of imported foreign figurative ideas. She has published the monograph Il Maestro di Ozieri. Le inquietudini nordiche di un pittore nella Sardegna del Cinquecento and authored articles on retablo-related topics, such as: Un oltremare diffuso. Il navegar sardesco fra Mediterraneo di Ponente, echi dell’Impero e italianismi; or Il nemico oltremarino come alteritá integrata? Casi di ebrei e musulmani nei retabli di Sardegna (1492-1556). A new book concerning retablos, in course of publication, examines the connections between Spanish and Italian painting in early XVI century, and Flemish-Iberian and Gothic-Catalan painting on Mediterranean routes. Maria Vittoria Spissu is interested in iconography studies regarding the figures of lunatics, deviants and subversives. Her current research theme centers on the representation of the Infidel in Europe between the Reformation and Counter-Reformation (Turk, Jew, Moor, Muslim, Lutheran, Catholic), paying particular attention to the migration of attributes involved in the fabrication of the enemy, as well as to the recourse to and display of such aspects as irony, violence, the ancient and the exotic, in the rendering of the contact with the Others.

Michael Cole is Professor and Department Chair of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University. A specialist in Italian Renaissance and Baroque art, his recent books include Ambitious Form: Giambologna, Ammanati, and Danti in Florence (Princeton, 2011), Italian Renaissance Art (co-authored with Stephen Campbell, Thames & Hudson, 2011, second edition underway) and Leonardo, Michelangelo, and the Art of the Figure (Yale, 2015). He became interested in the topic that grew into the Connecting Art Histories project when working with Rebecca Zorach on The Idol in the Age of Art: Objects, Devotions, and the Early Modern World (Ashgate, 2009), a co-edited volume that sought to move beyond the association of idolatry with image destruction and to ask the more art historical question of how concepts of idolatry mattered for image making in Europe, the Americas, and elsewhere. Currently he is writing a monograph on the painter Sofonisba Anguissola, whose career took her from Spanish Lombardy to Spain to the Viceroyalty of Sicily.

Ramón Mujica is an art historian  who specializes in Baroque Andean Christian art and iconography. He has done his postgraduate studies at New College (Sarasota, FLA) and  at St. Marc University, in Lima. Among his various  publications are: Ángeles  Apócrifos  en  la America Virreinal (1996), which examine the influence of Renaissance Hebrew angelology and Christian prophecy in Spanish imperial political theology, mysticism and art both in Spain and the Americas; Rosa Limensis ( 2001), a historical survey  on XVII´s century creole female spirituality championed by saint Rose of Lima, the first saint of the Americas. More recently the Printing Press of the Peruvian Congress has edited an anthological volume of his work titled: La Imagen Transgredida (2016). The book includes in depth essays on the nature of “Colonial art”: the false relationship between Metropolitan center and Provincial periphery, the Andean uses of European printed visual models, the influence and transformation of Tridentine iconography and theology, Jesuit mnemotecnics, the relationship between  sermons and emblem books, the survival of Medieval and Renaissance Classical motives in 18th century Andean art, among other topics. Mujica is an elected member of the Peruvian Academy of History (since 2007) and of the Argentinian Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes. Until recently he has been the National Director of the National Library of Peru (2010-2016) and has authored essays for catalogues and collaborated in the curatorial work of art exhibits in Peru, Spain and the United States. 

Rosario Nava has focused on studying the black color as a symbol of power in the Mesoamerican world. Her analysis has scoped the uses and functions of this color in body painting, as well in pre-Hispanic and colonial codices in Mexico. She has also specialized in studying the functions of the living image (ixptla), focusing mainly on the study of the human body as a medium to visualize this type of image. Her academic interests have also concentrated on the analysis of the permanence, transformation and dialogue established between the indigenous and European visual traditions. Rosario Nava has a Bachelor's degree in Sociology and a Master's degree in Art History. In 2018 she obtained a PhD in Art History, all from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). She is currently professor at the Escuela Nacional de Pintura y Escultura (Esmeralda/IMBA), and is part of the Interdisciplinary Seminar of the Conquest (www.noticonquista.unam.mx), a web based initiative to document public reflection and historical debates about the conquest of Mexico, Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas (UNAM).

Ulrich Pfisterer has taught art history at the Ludwig-Maximilians- Universität in Munich since 2006. He received his PhD from the University of Göttingen (1997) and undertook his ‘Habilitation’ at the University of Hamburg (2006). Fellowships allowed him to work at the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome, the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence, the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel, the Getty Research Center in LA and at CASVA/National Gallery of Art in Washington. His interests encompass the fields of early modern art in Europe and beyond as well as the methodology and historiography of art history. In 2012 he co-organized an exhibition on ‘Ideals and Idols’ which thematized the reception of non-European reglious artifacts in 15th- to 18th- century European books and book illustrations up to the publications of Montfaucon, Picart and Lafitau. He is directing two research projects on the ‘episteme of lines’ and drawing books from c. 1525–1925 and on concepts and images of the ruler’s body in early modern Europe. Ulrich has published books on – among others – Donatello, art literature and theory in the Italian Renaissance, the social uses of Renaissance medals in Italy, the Sistine Chapel and on ‘birthing art’ which deals with the relation of concepts of erotic and biological procreativity and artistic creativity in early modern Europe. He is also the general editor of the collected writings of Aby Warburg, for which he has co-edited the volume on Fragmente zur Ausdruckskunde (2015). Currently he is preparing a collected volume of global artistic exchange and contact zones c.1300-1650.

Valeria La Motta is a scholar in History of Political Institution. She studied Political Sciences at the University of Palermo (Italy) where she specialised in Early Modern History with a BA thesis about Christian renegades in the XVII century. In 2015, she obtained a PhD from the University of Messina (Italy) by discussing a thesis entitled L’Inquisizione in Sicilia durante il regno di Ferdinando d’Aragona (1469-1516). During her career, she became particularly involved in Hispanic studies, investigating the political forms through which the Catholic monarchy wielded his power in its Mediterranean domains. Among her publications: Saints in Prisons. Francesco Baronio’s Calendar, in Quaderni Storici 157 / a. LIII, n. 1, aprile 2018, pp. 107-133; El establecimiento de la Inquisición Española en Sicilia entre normas y prácticas (1500-1516) in «Anais de Estudios Inquisitoriales», UFRB, Cachoeira-BA, 2016; Sardegna, l’isola aragonese dimenticata dagli spagnoli, «Storia e Politica», IV, n. 3/2012, pp. 608-616. Now she is studing the graffiti of Palazzo Chiaromonte in Palermo. 

Vanessa A. Portugal is Assistant Professor of Global Art History at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. Her research focuses on art theory, and on the diverse uses of astrological images in the early modern world.

Her book Imagenes astrológicas en la Nueva España (UCO-Press 2018) explores the power of the astrological image through its artistic, political, meditative, divinatory, medical, and magical uses in New Spain from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. She is co-editor of the book Aby Warburg (en/sobre) América: historia, sobrevivencias y repercusiones (UNAM, 2024), and is currently working on her second book on the cosmological artistic program of the seventeenth-century monastery of the Order of Saint Augustine in Morelia, México.

Her publications and teaching explore a decolonial reception and interpretation of astronomical knowledge, and of Greco-Roman visual culture in colonial Latin American contexts.

Prof. Portugal studied history and received her PhD in art history from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). She has been a Visiting Research Fellow at University College London, a Visiting Scholar at the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at Durham University, and has held out research residencies at the Warburg Institute, the Pierpont-Morgan Library and Museum, the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library, the Kunsthistorisches Institute Max-Planck, the Plantin-Moretus Library.