Alessandra Russo
Assistant Professor
After a classical training at the University of Bologna, Alessandra Russo received her Ph.D. in History from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris) with a dissertation titled Triptyque novohispano. Plumes, cartes et graffiti pour une histoire métisse des arts, which was awarded a prize for excellence by the EHESS.
Since 1998 she has been visiting scholar and professor at the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas of the UNAM (Mexico), where she published her first book on colonial cartography, El realismo circular (2005), and is now preparing a second one on colonial graffiti (Guardatiempos). She is author of numerous essays on colonial visual culture in scholarly journals, conference proceedings and exhibition catalogues. At the Musée du Quai Branly of Paris she is collaborating with Serge Gruzinski on the exhibition Planète Métisse (March 2008/ Sept. 2009). With the support of a Getty collaborative research grant, she co-organized—with Diana Fane and Gerhard Wolf—the international seminar Feather Creations (NY, 2004) and, with them, is co-curator of the exhibition El vuelo de las imágenes, scheduled to open in 2009 at Munal in Mexico City.
She is currently working on the interdisciplinary possibilities of a historical anthropology of the gaze, analyzing sources and discourses —in literature, inventories, visual documents, curatorial practices, etc.—of prehispanic and colonial arts from the XVth century to the present.
Casa Hispánica 403
ar2701@columbia.edu
(212) 854-5267
(212) 854-5322