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 is Full Professor in History of Modern Art at the University of Naples Federico II. After receiving several research grants from national (IUAV) and international institutions (The Warburg Institute, Villa I Tatti-Harvard University, The Paul Mellon Centre), she was PI of the ERC project Historical Memory, Antiquarian Culture, Artistic Patronage in Renaissance Southern Italy (2011-2016) and of PRIN project Renaissance in Southern Italy and the Islands: Culutural Heritage and Technology (2018–2023). She has participated in several international projects, as The Quest of the Appropriate Past of KNAW, and Spanish Italy and Iberian Americas of the Columbia University - Getty Connected Art Histories. She is member of the scientific board of the Kunsthistorisches Institute in Florence, the Palladio Museum, the Center for the Art History of Port Cities La Capraia, the Pio Monte della Misericordia and the Museum of the Royal Palace in Naples. She is currently Deputy Director of the Department of Humanistic Studies and delegate member of the Research Commission of the University of Naples. She has published articles in international journals and a book on the patronage of the Carafa family in fifteenth century Naples (Marsilio 2007); among several volumes, she edited The Companion to the Renaissance in Southern Italy (Brill 2023) and is currently completing a monograph entitled The Renaissance and the Kingdom.

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. 

Ianick Takaes is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History and Archaeology and the Certificate Program in Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University, and the program coordinator of the Spanish Italy and the Iberian Americas research project. He specializes in early modern European art in relation to the Iberian Americas, early twentieth-century art historiography (with a focus on the Warburgian tradition), and experimental aesthetics. He holds a B.A. in Visual Arts and an M.A. in Art History from the State University of Campinas, Brazil. In his master's thesis, Ianick discussed and translated Edgar Wind's Art and Anarchy into Portuguese (Edunicamp, 2025). His writings have appeared in peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes, including the Journal of Art Historiography, Figura, and Engramma, among others. His most recent publication is “‘That Magnificent Sense of Disproportion’—Edgar Wind’s Critique of (Humorless) Modern Art,” in Edgar Wind: Art and Embodiment (Peter Lang, 2024).

In his doctoral dissertation, Ianick discusses the creation, circulation, and uses of Philippe Thomassin's multiplate engraving of the Last Judgment, which was made in Rome in 1606 and soon circulated around the Iberian world.  His work has been supported by several fellowships, most recently from the Huntington Library, the Folger Library, the NYPL, the Newberry Library, and the August Herzog August Bibliothek. In 2025–2026, Ianick will be a Jane and Morgan Whitney Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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 is an architect and architectural historian. In the early stages of his career, he contributed to the preservation of notable landmarks in Puebla de los Ángeles, Mexico, including the Palafoxiana Library, renowned for housing one of the Americas' most significant rare book collections. He has practiced architecture in Mexico, the United States, and Sweden, working on diverse projects ranging from historical preservation and museums to educational facilities and private residences.

He earned his master’s and doctoral degrees in History and Theory of Architecture from McGill University, completing his Ph.D. in 2017. His research centers on the history and theory of architecture and urbanism in early modern and modern Mexico and Latin America, emphasizing their connections to Europe, particularly Spain and Italy. In 2021, he published his first book, Architecture and Urbanism in Viceregal Mexico: Puebla de los Ángeles, Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries (Routledge). He has authored numerous peer-reviewed articles, public media essays, and edited book chapters in both Spanish and English. His current scholarly interests include the reception of classical architectural theory in viceregal Mexico, architecture and race in the early modern Hispanic world, and broader architectural and cultural exchanges between Mexico, Italy, and Spain. 

Professor Burke currently teaches urban and architectural history and theory at the School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, University of Maryland, College Park.

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 an Assistant Professor at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (PUCP), Lima. A Bolivian historian, she specializes in colonial Andean painting and its connections to space, religiosity, and Marian devotions. She earned her Ph.D. in History from the University of Buenos Aires in 2021 and has served as curator and director of the National Museum of Art in La Paz. From 2022 to 2024, she was a postdoctoral fellow in the ERC-funded project Global Economies of Salvation at the University of Zurich.
Her recent publications focus on the Virgin of Copacabana (Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture, 2023; Intrecci d'Arte, 2024) and the visual construction of Saint Rose of Lima (Brepols, 2025; Amsterdam University Press, 2026). She is currently working on a book exploring how a distinctive iconographic program in Caquiaviri framed the narrative of idolatry and salvation in the Andean world. She is a member of Empires, Objects, Environments, a Max Planck Partner Group/Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz/PUCP.
 

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, its relationship to issues of religious practices and experience, and the way in which global circulation impacted and shaped the Hispanic world, especially through Jesuit agency.  Prof. Alcalá has held fellowships from CASVA (National Gallery, Washington DC) and Dumbarton Oaks (Harvard University), and she has been a Visiting Professor at I Tatti (Harvard University, Florence). She has edited the volume Fundaciones Jesuíticas en Iberoamérica and co-edited, with Jonathan Brown, Painting in Latin America. She recently published her monograph La Virgen de Loreto en México. La Localización de un culto global, and the coedited volume published with Benito Navarrete, América en Madrid: cultura material, arte e imágenes. She currently directs the research group Agents: Jesuit Procurators and Alternative Channels for Artistic Circulation in the Hispanic World.

Maria Elisa Navarro Morales is Assistant Professor of History of Architecture in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Trinity College Dublin. She graduated as an architect from the Universidad de Los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia (1999), and holds an M.A. (2006) and a PhD (2013) in History and Theory of Architecture from McGill University, Canada. Before coming to Ireland, she taught architecture in Canada and Colombia. Her research interests focus on early modern architecture, architectural theory, and architectural books in Europe and its colonies. She is currently completing a monograph on Juan Caramuel de Lobkowitz (1606–82) and his treatise Architectura civil recta y obliqua (1678–79).  In 2023, Professor Navarro Morales co-edited with Professor Juan Luis Burke a thematic number on architects’s books in H-Art. Revista de Teoría, Historia y Crítica de Arte.   Her most recent project, A Portal to the Fagel Collection, is a collaboration with Professor Emily Monty (University of Kansas), where they use a surviving  eighteenth-century Dutch library, they investigate the visual and spatial aspects of early modern collecting and displaying practices in domestic environments.

Maria Vittoria Spissu is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Bologna. She was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow at the Center for Renaissance Studies of the Newberry Library, Chicago. She is currently a member of the international research group "Spanish Italy and the Iberian Americas" (directed by Columbia University professors Michael Cole and Alessandra Russo and funded by the Getty Foundation) and the EU-funded Cost Action "Islamic Legacy: Narratives East, West, South, North of the Mediterranean (1350-1750)". She is the principal investigator of "Global Empires, Artistic Mobility and Connected Histories" (UNIBO).

Her research and publications focus on the history of the Mediterranean Renaissance, the connections between Spanish Italy, the Spanish Netherlands, the Iberian Peninsula, and the Iberian-American viceroyalties, with an emphasis on the dissemination of models, itinerant foreign painters, and the construction of ideologies, imperial and Catholic, through paintings, prints, and books. Her latest book is entitled La Via dei Retabli: Le frontiere europee degli altari dipinti nella Sardegna del Quattro e Cinquecento (2018). Her most recent essay is "Traveling Models in the Iberian Marian Atlas: Pathos and Consensus between Flemish Mediterranean Networks and the Viceroyalty of New Spain". She also recently organized a symposium entitled "Empire of Concord? Communities and Authority in the Early Modern Iberian Worlds". She is co-editing a collective volume entitled "Ambivalent Harmonies: Representing Peace in Times of Conflict in the Early Modern Iberian Worlds.

Michael Cole is Howard McP. Davis Professor of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University. A specialist in Italian Renaissance and Baroque art, he is the author of Leonardo, Michelangelo, and the Art of the Figure (Yale, 2015) and Sofonisba's Lesson: A Renaissance Artist and Her Work (Princeton, 2019), among other books. 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. 

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 Román holds a Ph.D. and a Master's degree in Art History from the National Autonomous University of Mexico and a Bachelor's degree in Sociology from the same university. Rosario Nava is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Dr. José María Luis Mora Research Institute, where she is developing the project "African Diaspora: Studying the Past, Improving the Present and Preparing the Future". Since 2019, she has been a professor at the National School of Painting and Sculpture "La Esmeralda", where she is in charge of the pre-Hispanic Art Seminar and the "Historical Reflection of the Phenomenon of Racism in Mexico".

Professor Román has focused her work on the study of the black color as a symbol of power in the Mesoamerican world. Her analysis has explored the uses and functions of this color in body painting, as well as in pre-Hispanic and colonial codex in Mexico.

Ulrich Pfisterer has been teaching 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). He has held fellowships at the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome, the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence, the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel, the Getty Research Center in LA, and CASVA at the 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 religious artifacts in fifteenth- to eighteenth-century European books and book illustrations up to the publications of Montfaucon, Picart and Lafitau. He is currently directing two research projects, one on the “episteme of lines” and drawing books from c. 1525–1925 and the other on concepts and images of the ruler’s body in early modern Europe. Prof. Pfisterer’s publications includes books on Donatello, art literature and theory in the Italian Renaissance, the social uses of Renaissance medals in Italy, the Sistine Chapel, Leone Leoni's “failed” statue of Charles V, on mandrakes and nature as artist, 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.

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.