Content editors and contributors

Smarthistory is a consortium of 35+ editors and more than 800 contributors drawn from more than 350 colleges, universities, research centers, and museums.

Specialized Content Fellows

Andrea Achi, Fellow of African and Byzantine art

Amin Alsaden, Fellow of Modern and Contemporary Art from the Arab World

Panggah Ardiyansyah, Fellow of Southeast Asian Art

Kristen Brennan, Fellow of late 19th- and 20th-century Chinese art

Tamara Díaz Calcaño, Fellow of Caribbean art

Mya Chau, Fellow of Southeast Asian Art

Letha Ch’ien, Fellow of Early Modern Art

Chelsea Herr, Fellow of Indigenous Arts of North America

Stacy Kamehiro, Fellow of Oceanic Art

Haewon Kim, Fellow of Korean art

Melody Rod-ari, Fellow of Southeast Asian art

Sunanda K Sanyal, Fellow of Global Contemporary

Marika Sardar, Fellow of Islamic art

Elena FitzPatrick Sifford, Fellow of Art of the Spanish Americas

Alice Sullivan, Fellow of Eastern European art

Kathy Zarur, Fellow of Modern and Contemporary South West Asian and North African art

Previous Content Fellows

Christa Clarke, Fellow of African art

Heather Graham, Fellow of Italian Renaissance art

Content and Acquisitions Editors

Sarah Barack is Contributing Editor for conservation and material technology. She is Head of Conservation and Senior Objects Conservator at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. Sarah studied archaeology at Brown University. She received her Masters in Art History and Advanced Certificate in Conservation from the Conservation Center, Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. She also holds an MBA from Columbia University. Sarah completed a Mellon Fellowship at The Metropolitan Museum of Art focused on a technical study of 16th Century glass-working techniques and later joined the museum’s conservation staff. She also completed a Getty Postgraduate fellowship at the Oriental Institute Museum at the University of Chicago. She is co-chair for the K-12 Outreach Committee for the American Institute for Conservation.

Dr. Karen Barber is Contributing Editor for twentieth-century photography. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Mississippi, and specializes in the history and theory of twentieth-century photography. Her research explores interwar photography, photobooks, photographic exhibitions, and photography as it relates to Native America. She has also worked in significant photography collections in numerous American museums, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Amon Carter Museum of American Art.

Dr. Jeffrey A. Becker is Contributing Editor for Ancient Roman and Etruscan art. His research is focused on Italo-Roman architecture and urbanism, but is interested in urbanism across the Mediterranean basin, as a well as in building techniques, city planning, Roman villas, and archaeological theory. Becker was trained in Classics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (M.A., Ph.D.) and has extensive experience as a classroom instructor and as an excavator, having worked for a number of years in and around Rome.

Dr. Kris Belden-Adams is Contributing Editor for nineteenth- and twenty-first-century photography. She is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Mississippi and is the author of Photography, Temporality, Modernity: Time Warped (2019, Routledge) and Photography, Eugenics, ‘Aristogenics’: Picturing Privilege (2020, Routledge). She also is the editor and contributor of two chapters to the volume Photography and Failure: One Medium’s Incessant Entanglement with Mishaps, Flops, and Disappointments (Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2017), and ‘These Are Our Stories’: Diverse Histories, Narratives, and Identities in Photographic Albums (Routledge, 2022).

Dr. Saskia Beranek is a Contributing Editor in the area of Early Modern Dutch and Flemish art. Her research focuses on female patrons and artists in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic with particular interest in the interaction between paintings, architecture, and garden design. Beranek received an M.A from Duke University and her PhD from the University of Pittsburgh and teaches widely on Renaissance and Early Modern topics in both art and architectural history.

Dr. Amy Calvert is the Contributing Editor for Ancient Egyptian art. Amy holds a Ph.D. from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University and has been involved in several excavations in Italy, Egypt, and the U.S. She has acted as registrar in the field for the Osiris Temple Project with the Yale-University of Pennsylvania-New York University Expedition to Abydos and has worked at The British Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Dr. Kristen Loring Brennan is Contributing Editor for the art of later China and Korea. She earned her M.A. from Harvard University and her Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research concentrates on late imperial Chinese painting. She is currently Associate Professor of Art at Pepperdine University.

Dr. Cortney E. Chaffin is Contributing Editor for the art of ancient China. She earned her Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania with a focus on early Chinese art and archaeology. Her research interests focus on the materiality of death in ancient China and the rich array of fantastic hybrid animal imagery in early Chinese funerary art. She is a professor of Asian art history at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point.

Dr. Rebecca Jeffrey Easby is Contributing Editor for 19th Century Art and an Associate Professor of Art History and Chair of the Fine Arts Program at Trinity Washington University in Washington, D.C. Her research can be found in publications such as The Burlington Magazine and History and Community: Essays in Victorian Medievalism (Garland Press). She received her Ph.D. from the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London.

Dr. Caitlin Earley is Contributing Editor for Mesoamerican art. She is an Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Washington. She has performed field research in Belize, Guatemala and Mexico, working most extensively with archaeological and museum collections in Chiapas, Mexico. She has held research fellowships at Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection in Washington, DC and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, NY. She taught art history at University of Nevada, Reno, the University of Texas, Colorado College and Georgetown University.

Beth Edelstein is Contributing Editor for conservation and material technology. Beth is currently Conservator of Objects at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Previously, she was an Associate Conservator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, focusing on the Arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas. Beth earned her M.A. from the Conservation Center, Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, and was an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the Cloisters, studying Spanish polychrome tomb sculpture. Beth is co-chair with Sarah Barack of the K-12 Outreach Committee for the American Institute for Conservation.

Dr. Jennifer Awes Freeman is Contributing Editor for early medieval art. She received her M.A.R. from Yale Divinity School and her Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University where she studied the relationship between art and theology in the Carolingian era. She is the Assistant Professor and Program Director of Theology and the Arts at United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities and also teaches medieval art as a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota. She has two books forthcoming in 2021: The Ashburnham Pentateuch: The Iconography of the Trinity in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (Boydell & Brewer) and The Good Shepherd: Image, Meaning, and Power (Baylor University Press).

Dr. Evan Freeman is Contributing Editor for Byzantine art and co-editor of the Smarthistory Guide to Byzantine Art with Anne McClanan. He is Assistant Professor and Hellenic Canadian Congress of BC Chair in Hellenic Studies in the Department of Global Humanities and at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Centre for Hellenic Studies at Simon Fraser University. After receiving his Ph.D. from Yale University, he held an Andrew W. Mellow postdoctoral fellowship at Smarthistory and an Alexander von Humboldt postdoctoral research fellowship at the University of Regensburg. He co-edited Byzantine Materiality (De Gruyter) with Roland Betancourt.

Dr. Senta German is Contributing Editor for the art of the Ancient Near East. Now at the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, University of Oxford, Senta took her Ph.D. at Columbia University in Aegean, Greek, and Ancient Near Eastern archaeology and art. She explores the intersection of art and ancient Greek society with specific attention to performance, gender and the impacts of the illicit antiquities trade and forgery. She has taught at Columbia University, New York University, Rutgers University and was Associate Professor of Classics and Art History at Montclair State University.

Dr. Heather Graham is Contributing Editor for Renaissance art in Central Italy and Associate Professor at Cal State University-Long Beach. Her research and publications explore Italian Renaissance art as it intersects with the history of the body and of the emotions, early modern medicine, mourning behaviors and death, gender and sexual culture, and religion.

Dr. Amanda Herring is Contributing Editor for ancient Greek art. She is assistant professor art history at Loyola Marymount University. She received her B.A. in Art History & Classical Archaeology from Dartmouth College and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Art History from UCLA. At LMU, she teaches courses on the art and architecture of the ancient world.

Dr. Sally Hickson is Contributing Editor for Renaissance art in Northern Italy and Associate Professor of Renaissance Art History at the University of Guelph. She has received the H.P. Krauss Fellowship in early books and manuscripts at the Beinecke Library at Yale University (2009), and the Natalie Zemon Davis Award from the Journal Renaissance and Reformation (2010). She is the author of Women, Art and Architectural Patronage in Renaissance Mantua: Matrons, Mystics and Monasteries (Ashgate 2012), and the co-editor of Inganno—The Art of Deception (Ashgate, 2012).

Dr. Maya Jiménez is Contributing Editor for Twentieth-Century Latin American Art. She received her Ph.D. from the Graduate Center, CUNY, where she focused on the transatlantic dialogues between Latin American and European modern art. She is currently a lecturer at the Museum of Modern Art and Assistant Professor at Kingsborough Community College, CUNY.

Dr. Bryan C. Keene (he/él/they/elle) specializes in medieval and early modern manuscript illumination, with a particular focus on Italy. His research addresses transregional movement of objects and ideas, as well as the fields of “global” art history and queer premodern visual culture. He teaches at Riverside City College in California and was previously a curator and educator at the Getty Museum.

Dr. Rex Koontz is Contributing Editor for Pre-Columbian art in Mesoamerica. Rex is an art historian who works in the museum collections and archaeological sites of Mexico. He has written extensively on the ancient history of Mexico, including the recent Lightning Gods and Feathered Serpents: The Public Sculpture of El Tajin (2009, University of Texas Press). He is also the author (with Michael Coe) of Mexico: From the Olmecs to the Aztecs, the standard English introduction to the history of Ancient Mexico. He was recently one of three North Americans asked to contribute to the celebration of Mexico’s Bicentenary at the National Museum of Anthropology and History, Mexico City. He is currently Professor of Art History and Director of the School of Art, University of Houston.

Dr. Beatrice Leal in Contributing Editor for art of the Islamic world. She is an honorary lecturer in the Department of Art History and World Art Studies at the University of East Anglia, a trustee of the Hungate Medieval Art centre in Norwich (UK), and an associate of the Manar al-Athar image archive at the University of Oxford. Most of her research is on the material culture of the late antique, early medieval, and early Islamic Mediterranean and surrounding regions. She has a particular interest in non-figural imagery, and in the cultural associations and uses of materials.

Dr. Billie Lythberg is Contributing Editor for the Art of Oceania. Billie received her PhD in Art History from the University of Auckland (NZ), and completed post-doctoral research at Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA,UK). She is currently Senior Research Fellow at the University of Auckland Business School and an Affiliated Researcher at MAA. Billie explores Indigenous economies and aesthetics and has collaborated with Māori and Pacific artists, academics and communities towards co-developed research, co-authored publications, co-curated exhibitions, and projects of artistic and economic revitalisation. She has a particular passion for eighteenth-century Māori and Tongan artefacts, and the economic and political objectives their transactions were harnessed to.

Dr. Elizabeth Macaulay is Acquisitions Editor for Roman and Islamic Art, as well as concerns of cultural heritage and archaeology. She is an archaeologist and architectural historian. She has served on the Governing Board of the Archaeological Institute of America. She is currently an Associate Professor at The Graduate Center, The City University of New York, the Executive Officer of the M.A. in Liberal Studies and a member faculty of the MA programs in Liberal Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, and Digital Humanities. She has a DPhil in Classical Archaeology from Oxford University.

Dr. Joanna Milk Mac Farland is Contributing Editor for Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century Tuscan Art. She recently received her Ph.D. in the History of Art from the University of London’s Courtauld Institute of Art, where she attended as a Thomas Lee scholar. Currently, she is working on a book project investigating depictions of visionary experience in early Renaissance Italy.

Dr. Arathi Menon is is Contributing Editor for South Asian Art. She is an Assistant Professor of Art History at Hamilton College. Menon earned her Ph.D. in Art History and Archaeology from Columbia University, with a specialization in the art and architecture of South Asia and a focus on the material culture of the premodern Indian Ocean. Her research has examined medieval temple architecture in Kerala, and a syncretic and idiomatic mode of sacred art and architecture in Kerala’s churches, mosques, and synagogues. Menon’s research has been supported by the Steven Kossak Fellowship in Indian art, the Riggio Fellowship in Art History, and the American Institute of Indian Studies. She is co-editor of the Bulletin for the American Council of Southern Asian Art and has previously taught at Columbia University and at Scripps College of the Claremont Colleges

Dr. Wayne Ngata is an advisor on the art of the Pacific Islands. He is Head of Matauranga Māori (Māori knowledge) at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. He is an advocate for reo Māori and mātauranga Māori as platforms for helping Māori to contribute constructively to the advancement of New Zealand society, including the museum sector. His research interests include revitalisation of indigenous language and knowledge as future models of best practice.

Dr. Bonnie J. Noble is Contributing Editor for the Northern Renaissance. She is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She received her Ph.D. in art history from Northwestern University, her MA in art history from the University of Pennsylvania. Her specialization is the art of the Northern Renaissance, particularly sixteenth-century German painting.

Dr. Melody Rod-ari is Contributing Editor for Southeast Asian art. She earned her M.A. from Boston University and her Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research examines modern and contemporary Thai Buddhist visual culture. She is currently Assistant Curator of Asian art at the Norton Simon Museum and Editor for the American Council for Southern Asian Art. Beginning in August she will join the faculty of art history at Loyola Marymount University.

Dr. Elizabeth Rodini (Ph.D. University of Chicago) is contributing editor for Museum Studies. She founded the Program in Museums and Society at Johns Hopkins University and served for ten years as its Director and as Teaching Professor in the History of Art. She teaches and writes about museum and collection history, heritage landscapes, and the politics of culture. Dr. Rodini’s art historical work centers on cross-cultural encounters in the early modern period, focusing on matters of object mobility, recontextualization, and reuse. Her current book project focuses on Gentile Bellini’s portrait of the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II, using it as a lens to examine questions of authenticity, verisimilitude, ownership, cross-cultural exchange, and political identity in a global context.

Dr. Sarahh Scher is a Contributing Editor for Pre-Columbian South American Art. She received her Ph.D. in art history from Emory University and an M.F.A. in printmaking from New Mexico State University. Her research focuses on issues surrounding the representation of gender, identity, and costume in the Andean area. She teaches part-time at Salem State University.

Dr. Cristin McKnight Sethi is Contributing Editor for the art of South Asia. Cristin earned her M.A. from the University of Texas at Austin and her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. Her research examines South Asian art of the early modern to contemporary periods with a particular focus on the production and circulation of textiles and craft. She has held curatorial and research positions at a number of museums including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She is currently Assistant Professor of Art History at the George Washington University.

Dr. Hannah Lubman Sigur holds a Ph.D. from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Since 2003 she has taught at several Bay Area universities. From an initial emphasis on the traditional arts of Japan, her courses and interests now encompass a spectrum—across the arts of traditional and modern Asia to the material culture of internationalism and cross-cultural exchange particularly in the development of modernism, from contemporary craft to modern floral design. Her 2008 book, The Influence of Japanese Art on Design examines Japonisme, Arts & Crafts, Art Nouveau, and early Contemporary design across a range of media. Her deepest interests lie in the architecture of the world’s fairs from 1867 – 1915, particularly with respect to Japanese and American national identity.

Dr. Laura Tillery is the Contributing Editor for Northern European Medieval art. She received a Ph.D. in the history of art from the University of Pennsylvania and held a Marie-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Her research concentrates on late-medieval multimedia devotional art in northern Europe, Scandinavia, and the Baltic Sea region, with particular focus on cross-cultural exchange and pre-modern race-making. She is currently an Assistant Professor in Art History at Hamilton College.

Dr. Allison Young is Contributing Editor for Global Modern and Contemporary Art. She is currently Assistant Professor for Contemporary Art History at Louisiana State University. A specialist in postcolonial and contemporary art of the Global South, Allison received her Ph.D. in Art History in 2017 from the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, with her dissertation “Torn and Most Whole: On the Poetics of Difference in the Art of Zarina Bhimji.” She previously held an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship in Modern and Contemporary Art at the New Orleans Museum of Art, where her curatorial projects included Carlos Rolón: Outside/In (2018), Changing Course: Reflections on New Orleans Histories (2018), Lina Iris Viktor: A Haven. A Hell. A Dream Deferred (2018), Bodies of Knowledge (2019) and others.

Dr. Rachel Zimmerman is Contributing Editor for the early modern Portuguese empire. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Art History at Colorado State University-Pueblo. She holds a Ph.D. in art history from the University of Delaware. Her research focuses on artistic production, circulation, and consumption within the early modern Portuguese world, particularly the colony of Brazil.

Dr. Bryan J. Zygmont is Contributing Editor for American Art. He earned his Ph.D. from the Department of Art History and Archaeology at the University of Maryland in 2006. He is currently Professor of Art History and Associate Dean of the College of Liberal Arts at Louisiana Tech University. Zygmont is the author of Portraiture and Politics in New York City, 1790-1825: Gilbert Stuart, John Vanderlyn, John Trumbull, and John Welsey Jarvis, a book he partially wrote while a Visiting Scholar at the National Portrait Gallery. Zygmont was a Fulbright Scholar in 2013.

Former content editors

Dr. Esperança Camara was Contributing Editor for Mannerist and Baroque art.

Dr. Ellen Hurst was Contributing Editor for Byzantine art.

Dr. Lauren G. Kilroy-Ewbank was Contributing Editor for Latin American Colonial and Native American/First Nation art.

Dr. Peri Klemm was Contributing Editor for African art.

Dr. Nancy Ross was Contributing Editor for Medieval Art.

Contributors