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.
