Columbia SPPO

Alessandra Russo

Associate Professor

Alessandra Russo has been trained in art history and historical anthropology at the Universitá di Bologna, at the Universiteit Leiden, and at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, in Paris, where she received her Ph.D. (2006). Her dissertation was awarded the EHESS best dissertation prize. Before joining the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures, at Columbia, in 2007, she had been visiting researcher at the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas (UNAM, Mexico).

Professor Russo is author of the books The Untranslatable Image. A Mestizo History of the Arts in New Spain (1500-1600) (Austin, University of Texas Press, 2014; French edition, Les Presses du reel), El realismo circular. Tierras, espacios y paisajes de la cartografía novohispana. Siglos XVI-XVII (Mexico, IIE- UNAM, 2005), and the co-editor of Images Take Flight. Feather Art in Mexico and Europe, 1300-1700 (Munich, Hirmer Verlag, forthcoming). Her new book manuscript is entitled A New Antiquity. Theories of the Arts and Iberian Expansion (1400-1600).

She has also authored numerous articles in international journals (Res. Anthropology and Aesthetics, Journal of the History of Collections, October, Terra Brasilis, Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas etc.) in books and exhibition catalogs (Art History in the Wake of the Global Turn, The Challenge of the Object, Brincando Fronteras, Colors Between Two Worlds, Pintura de los Reinos, Planète Métisse, The Arts of Latin America, Painting the New World, etc.). With the support of a Getty Foundation Collaborative Research Grant, she curated with Gerhard Wolf and Diana Fane the exhibition El vuelo de las imágenes. Arte plumario en México y Europa. 1300-1700 (Museo Nacional de Arte, México, 2011). In Paris, she also collaborated with Serge Gruzinski in the curatorship of Planète Métisse (Musée du Quai Branly).

At Columbia, Professor Russo teaches courses on the Early Modern Iberian Worlds, with a special emphasis on the theory, practice, and displaying of the arts, between 1400 and 1600. Her courses include graduate seminars (Theory of the Arts in the Iberian Worlds; Visions from Afar, Visions from Nearby) and undergraduate courses (Seeing and Describing. Early Modern Arts and their Accounts; Image Making in the Iberian Worlds; and the senior courses Iberian Globalization and Nature and Sacredness).

During the 2012-2013 academic year she has been invited as a research fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg (Institute for Advanced Study), in Berlin. She has been a visiting professor at the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art (July, 2010), and at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, in Paris (May, 2011 and May 2015).

Professor Russo is also an affiliated faculty of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society (ICLS), a member of the Institute of Latin American Studies (ILAS) and of the Blinken European Institute, Columbia University.

 

Selection of published articles (for books, see links above):

  • “These statues they generally called çemi. A new object at the crossroad of languages” The Challenge of the Object/Die Herausforderung des Objekts, Ed. by Ulrich Grossmann, Petra Krutisch, Nuremberg, 2013, pp. 45-49.
  • “Tradition”, Art Bulletin, (“Notes from the Field”), December 2013, pp. 540-543.
  • “De tlacuilolli. Renaissance Artistic Theory in the Wake of the Iberian Global Turn”, in Jill Casid, Aruna D’Souza, ed., Art History in the Wake of the Global Turn. Clark Institute/distributed Yale University Press, 2013, pp. 20-39.
  • “Cartography: Spanish America” (pair entry on “Cartography” with Ricardo Padrón) for the Lexikon of the Hispanic Baroque: Technologies of a Transatlantic Culture, Editors:Kenneth Mills and Evonne Levy, Austin, Texas University Press, 2013, pp. 28-32.
  •  “Recomposing the Image. Presents and Absents in the Mass of Saint Gregory, Mexico, 1539”, in: Synergies: Creating Art in Joined Culture, ed. Manuela De Giorgi, Annette Hoffmann, Nicole Suthor, (Studies in Honor of Gerhard Wolf). Florence, Kunsthistorisches Institut-Max Planck, 2012, pp. 465-481.
  •  “Uncatchable Colors”, Postface to Colors Between Two Worlds. The Florentine Codex of Bernardino de Sahagún, Florence, Villa I Tatti, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies /Kunsthistorisches Institut-Max Planck, 2012 (distributed Harvard University Press), 2012, pp. 388-410.
  • « Salir del laberinto. Tradición y contemporaneidad en las propuestas de tres artistas mexicanos», chapter 3, Brincando Fronteras. Creaciones locales mexicanas y globalización, edited by Patrice Giasson, México, CONACULTA, 2012, pp. 116-144.
  • Alessandra Russo, Gerhard Wolf, Diana Fane, El vuelo de las imágenes. Arte plumario en México y Europa/Images take flight. Feather Art in Mexico and Europe. Booklet of the exhibition, 44 pp. México, MUNAL/INBA/INAH, 2011.
  • “Cortés’s objects and the Idea of New Spain : Inventories as Spatial Narratives”, Journal of the History of Collections (J. Keating, L. Markey, editors, special issue "Captured Objects: Inventories of Early Modern Collections"), Oxford University Press, 2011, pp. 1-24.
  • Alessandra Russo, Gerhard Wolf, Diana Fane, El vuelo de las imágenes. Arte plumario en México y Europa/Images take flight. Feather Art in Mexico and Europe. Booklet of the exhibition, 44 pp. México, MUNAL/INBA/INAH, 2011.
  •  “The Global before Globalization” (with B.Flood; D.Joselit; A.Nagel; E.Wang; C.Wood; M.Yiengpruksawan), October, 133 (Summer 2010), MIT Press, pp. 3-19.
  • « Horizontlinie, Point of No Return. Die Ankunft der Spanier an der Küste Mexikos in den Illustrationen des Codex Durán», in Das Meer, der Tausch und die Grenzen der Repräsentation, Berlin, Diaphanes Verlag, 2009, pp. 311-322.
  •  Image-plume, temps reliquaire? Tangibilités d’une histoire esthétique », Traditions et Temporalités des Images (edit. by G. Careri, F. Lissarague,  J-C. Schmitt, C. Severi), Paris, EHESS, 2009: chapter 9.
  •  “Triptyque novohispano. Plumes, cartes et graffiti pour une histoire métisse des arts (16e-17e siècles). Discours liminaire à la soutenance de these ”, in Nuevo Mundo Mundos Nuevos, n. 7 (2007)
  • A Tale of two bodies. On aesthetic condensation in the Mexican colonial graffiti of Actopan, 1629 », Res. Antrhropology and Aesthetics 49-50 (2006), Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology and the Harvard Art Museums, pp. 59-79.
  •  “Plumes of Sacrifice. Transformations in Sixteenth-Century Mexican Feather art” Res. Anthropology and Aesthetics 42 (2002), Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology and the Harvard Art Museums, pp. 226-250.
  • “El Renacimiento vegetal. Arboles de Jesé entre el Viejo Mundo y el Nuevo”, Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, n. 73 (1998), IIE- UNAM, pp. 5-39

 

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