Notes on Contributors
Carrie Anderson
is an Associate Professor of Art History at Middlebury College in Vermont. Her primary area of research is the art of the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic, within which she focuses on themes related to intra- and intercultural diplomacy, trade, and gift exchange. She is also the co-principal investigator of The Dutch Textile Trade Project.
Stephanie Archangel
has been a curator of History at the Rijksmuseum since 2016. She has co-curated the exhibitions Slavery (2021), 80 Years’ War (2018), and Here. Black in Rembrandt’s Time (2020) and she is currently working on a terminology project, in which the Rijksmuseum takes a critical look at existing titles and descriptions of its collection. Archangel has published on the depiction of Black people in European art circa 1500–1700, on the Harlem Renaissance and the Dutch Caribbean, and, in collaboration with conservators, on a multidisciplinary approach to determining the date and provenance of wood in historical objects. She received her degree in Sociology at the University of Amsterdam.
Carolyn Arena
earned her PhD in history from Columbia University in the City of New York. Her research has been funded by FLAS, Fulbright, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the London School of Economics, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Dr. Arena has published her work on the enslavement of Indigenous people in the collection The Torrid Zone (Lou Roper, editor) and the journal Ethnohistory; she and co-author D. Andrew Johnson received the “best article of 2020” for their work in The Journal of Southern History. Presently, Dr. Arena serves as a public affairs specialist for the Fulbright Program at the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau for Educational and Cultural Affairs, where she is the senior editor of
La Tanya S. Autry
is an art historian, educator, curator, and writer, who believes in making cultural work liberatory praxis. She co-produced the global movement Museums Are Not Neutral and has created exhibitions and programming via institutions and independent projects.
Ariana Benson
is a Southern Black ecopoet. She is a graduate of Spelman College and Royal Holloway, University of London, where she studied Poetic Practice as a 2019 Marshall Scholar. Ariana received the 2022 Furious Flower Poetry Prize, the 2022 Porter House Review Poetry Prize, and the 2021 Graybeal-Gowen Prize. Her poems tug on threads of embodied Blackness, environment and ecology, how the natural world is valued in certain contexts while devalued in others, and the role that “beauty” as worth plays in our lived experiences.
Anthony Bogues
is a writer, scholar, curator, humanities professor at Brown university, and the Director of the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice. Bogues’s major research and writing interests are intellectual, literary and cultural history, radical political thought, political theory, critical theory, Caribbean and African politics as well as Haitian, Caribbean, and African Art. He is the author of numerous books and essays and co-editor of the volume on African and African Diasporic Art The Imagined New (2023). He has curated and co-curated shows in the United States, South Africa, and the Caribbean.
Pepijn Brandon
is professor of Global Economic and Social History at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and Senior Researcher at the International Institute of Social History. He is the author of War, Capital, and the Dutch State 1588–1795 (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2015). He has published widely on the history of slavery and colonialism, and was the coordinator of large public history projects on the connections to slavery of the city of Amsterdam and of predecessors of Dutch bank ABN Amro.
Justin M. Brown
is Assistant Professor of Art History and African and African Diaspora Studies at Boston College. His research focuses on Caribbean and South American art, with a particular emphasis on the artistic traditions of African-descendant communities. He has published and presented work on topics related to the visual and material culture of slavery in the Atlantic world and has worked in curatorial and research positions at the National Gallery of Art, the Worcester Art Museum, and the Yale Center for British Art.
Rachel Burke
is a PhD candidate in art history at Harvard University studying Henry “Box” Brown, who created a moving panorama following his escape from slavery in 1849. Her dissertation examines Brown’s use of popular nineteenth-century landscapes, tracing how antebellum representations of the American environment reinforced programs of white supremacy.
Jacquelyn N. Coutré
is the Eleanor Wood Prince Curator at the Art Institute of Chicago, where she oversees the collection of Northern European painting and sculpture. She recently co-curated Van Gogh and the Avant-Garde: The Modern Landscape (2023) in partnership with the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. Prior to her position in Chicago, she was the Bader Curator and Researcher of European Art at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre of Queen’s University (Kingston, ON), where she `organized numerous exhibitions, including Leiden circa 1630: Rembrandt Emerges (2019) and The Powers of Women: Female Fortitude in European Art (2018).
Olivia Dill
is the Moore Curatorial Fellow at the Morgan Library & Museum, New York, and a PhD candidate in Art History at Northwestern University, researching early modern art and science in the seventeenth-century Dutch Atlantic. Her dissertation analyzes the material strategies used by Maria Sibylla Merian and others to render and conceptualize iridescence in depictions of insects.
Adam Eaker
is Associate Curator of European Paintings at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he is responsible for seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Northern European and British painting. He has curated exhibitions on Anthony van Dyck, seventeenth-century Dutch painting, and art at the Tudor courts. His publications include Van Dyck and the Making of English Portraiture (2022) and Gesina ter Borch (2024).
Cheryl Finley
is director of the Atlanta University Center Art History + Curatorial Studies Collective and Distinguished Visiting Professor of Art History at Spelman College. A visionary leader committed to engaging strategic partners to transform the art and culture industry, she leads an innovative undergraduate program at the world’s largest historically Black college and university (HBCU) consortium in preparing the next generation of African American museum and visual arts professionals. She is a curator, contemporary art critic, and award-winning author noted for Committed to Memory: The Art of the Slave Ship Icon (2018), the first in-depth study of the most famous image associated with the memory of slavery—a schematic engraving of a packed slave ship hold—and the art, architecture, poetry, and film it has inspired since its creation in Britain in 1788.
Mariana Françozo
is an anthropologist and a historian and works as associate professor of museum studies at Leiden University. Her research focuses on Indigenous Brazilian objects in European collections from the early cabinets of curiosities until present-day collaborative projects.
Michele L. Frederick
is Curator of European Art and Provenance Research at the North Carolina Museum of Art. She has previously served as the Samuel H. Kress Foundation Interpretive Fellow at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Samuel H. Kress Predoctoral Fellow at The Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Her upcoming exhibition project is The Book of Esther in the Age of Rembrandt (2025–2026) in partnership with the Jewish Museum, New York.
Maria Holtrop
studied History, European Studies, and Journalism at the universities of Amsterdam and Utrecht, and has been Curator of History at the Rijksmuseum since 2013. She worked on multiple exhibitions including Good Hope (2017), Crawling Creatures (2023), and Point of View, a gendered take on the collection (2024). She was one of the curators of the Slavery exhibition (2021), focusing primarily on the slavery past around the Indian Ocean region, and was additionally responsible for the Rijksmuseum & Slavery project. Previously published writings by Holtrop include work on colonial collecting in the seventeenth century, Dutch colonial slavery around the Indian ocean, Asian servants in the Netherlands and the image of Black women in the collection of the Rijksmuseum 1500–1700.
Meredith Sorin Horsford
serves as Executive Director of the Pocantico Center of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, leading arts and culture engagement and thought leader convenings. Previously, Horsford was Executive Director of the Historic House Trust of New York City (HHT), stewarding twenty-three historic sites citywide. Prior to her role at HHT, Horsford served as Executive Director of the Dyckman Farmhouse Museum, leading her team toward creative and inclusive programming and interpretation. Her goal at the museum was to connect the past with the present through programs such as a recurring race lecture series, contemporary art installations highlighting the Black experience in America and urban agricultural programs.
Kéla Jackson
is a PhD candidate in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University. Working at the intersection of art history, visual culture, and Black studies, her dissertation focuses on ruptural aesthetics—collage, constructed photography, and quilting—in contemporary visions of Black girlhood. Her writing has been published in Boston Art Review, Panorama Journal of American Art, as well as various exhibition catalogues, including The Sculpture of William Edmondson: Tombstones, Garden Ornaments, and Stonework.
Jane’a Johnson
PhD, is a curator, writer, and lecturer. Her work and writings have focused on photography, archives, race, and visual culture in the African Diaspora. She is formerly Assistant Professor of Theory of Art + Design and History, Philosophy + Social Sciences at Rhode Island School of Design and Artistic Director of Fotografie Museum, Amsterdam. Johnson received her PhD in Modern Culture and Media from Brown University, where she directed the Photographic Archives Research Group. She has appeared in programs for institutions such as The Barbican Centre, The Photographers’ Gallery, and Vogue.
Nancy Jouwe
is a cultural historian and works as a freelance researcher, writer and curator. She studied Gender Studies and Cultural History at Utrecht University and York University (UK) and is an external PhD student at the Anthropology Department of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. She has co-edited several books and written articles on topics relating to the arts, intersectionality, colonial history, slavery and its afterlife, and diasporic socio-cultural movements. She is a 2022–2025 fellow at the University of the Arts Utrecht and a crown member of the Dutch Council for Culture.
Remy Jungerman
lives and works in Amsterdam and New York. He attended the Academy for Higher Arts and Cultural Studies in Paramaribo, Suriname, before moving to Amsterdam, where he studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy. In his work, Jungerman explores the intersection of pattern and symbol in Surinamese Maroon culture, the larger African diaspora, and twentieth-century Modernism. By placing fragments of Maroon textiles and other materials found in the African diaspora in direct contact with materials and imagery drawn from more “established” art traditions, Jungerman presents a peripheral vision that enriches our perspective on art history. Jungerman represented the Netherlands at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019. In 2021–2022, he had a solo show at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and, in 2022, he received the Heineken Prize for art.
Marsely L. Kehoe
PhD, University of Wisconsin, is an independent scholar who works in higher education administration. Her research considers early modern Dutch material and visual culture in the colonial context. In 2023, she published Trade, Globalization, and Dutch Art and Architecture: Interrogating Dutchness and the Golden Age with Amsterdam University Press. She is also the co-PI of The Dutch Textile Trade Project.
Jamaica Kincaid
is one of the most highly acclaimed writers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Her works include Annie John, Lucy, The Autobiography of My Mother, and Mr. Potter, as well as her classic history of Antigua, A Small Place, and the memoir My Brother. Her first book, the collection of stories At the Bottom of the River, won the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Kincaid was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2004. She has received a Guggenheim Award, the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, the Prix Femina Étranger, Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Clifton Fadiman Medal, and the Dan David Prize for Literature. She is currently Professor of African and African American Studies in Residence at Harvard University.
Cynthia Kok
studies the art and material culture of the early modern Dutch global world. She received her PhD in the History of Art from Yale University and she is currently a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Rijksmuseum.
Eugene Lange
is a poet who lives and works in Liverpool.
Alexandra Libby
is Senior Administrator for Collections and Initiatives and a curator of northern Baroque paintings at the National Gallery of Art, Washington. She has (co-)curated several exhibitions, including Water, Wind, and Waves: Marine Painting from the Dutch Golden Age (2018), Vermeer’s Secrets (2022), and Little Beasts: Art, Wonder, and the Natural World (2025). Prior to joining the National Gallery, she was assistant curator of European art at the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota.
Imara Limon
is an art historian and a Curator of Contemporary Art at the Amsterdam Museum. She specializes in socially engaged artistic practices, curating shows exploring the city’s colonial history and its impact on present-day belonging and identity. Recent exhibitions include Refresh Amsterdam #2: War & Conflict (2023–2024) and Manahahtáanung or New Amsterdam? The Indigenous Story Behind New York (2024). Limon has held advisory positions in arts funds and is on the Board of Trustees of Centraal Museum Utrecht.
Sarah W. Mallory
is the Annette and Oscar de la Renta Assistant Curator of Drawings and Prints at The Morgan Library & Museum. She previously held positions at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Frick Collection, and Harvard Art Museums. She is completing her PhD in the history of art and architecture at Harvard University, where she focuses on seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish art, environmental histories, and colonial legacies.
Carolina Monteiro
is a PhD candidate at Leiden University as part of the ERC Project BRASILIAE. Carolina’s research focuses on the knowledge, cultural practices and social role of enslaved Africans from different points of origin and cultural backgrounds in the period of Dutch Brazil (1630–1654), beyond their captivity status.
Andrea C. Mosterman
is associate professor in Atlantic History and Joseph Tregle Professor in Early American History at the University of New Orleans. She studies slavery and the slave trade in early America and the Dutch Atlantic world.
Linda Mueller
is a PhD candidate in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University. Sitting at the junction of early modern art history, legal history, and the history of empires, her research engages with art and the visual legal cultures in Italy and the Spanish Empire.
Kymberly S. Newberry
is Visiting Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Richmond. She received her B.A. in International Relations from Mount Holyoke, where as a McCulloch Center for Global Initiatives Fellow, she was a visiting scholar and lecturer of African American culture in Istanbul, Turkey. She received her M.A. and PhD in African American Studies from the W. E. B. Du Bois Department of Afro American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. In her role as Assistant Curator of Special Projects at the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, Newberry curated the exhibition And I Will Spatter the Sky Utterly: Romuald Hazoumè.
Rosana Paulino
is a São Paulo-based artist whose work focuses on the position of Black women in Brazilian society. Her prints, drawings, sculptures, installations, and assemblages explore and express the physical and emotional violence suffered because of racism and the many legacies of slavery. Her work is represented in the collections of the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, the University of New Mexico Art Museum, and the Museu Afro Brasil, and she has participated in numerous exhibitions in Brazil as well as in France, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Belgium, South Africa, and the United States. Paulino was awarded a Ford Foundation International Fellowship in 2006 and a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Residency Fellowship in 2014. She holds a doctorate from the University of São Paulo.
Jessie Park
is the Nina and Lee Griggs Assistant Curator of European Art at the Yale University Art Gallery. She co-curated and supervised the exhibitions Crafting Worldviews: Art and Science in Europe, 1500–1800 (2023) and Thinking Small: Dutch Art to Scale (2023), respectively. Prior to joining Yale, she served as the Rousseau Curatorial Fellow in European Art at the Harvard Art Museums and held curatorial positions at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles and the Huntington in San Marino, California, where she curated the exhibition Crossing the Alps: Artistic Exchange and the Printed Image in Renaissance Europe (2013–2014).
Louisa M. Raitt
is a PhD candidate at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts. Her dissertation, “The Frontiers of Femininity: Self-Fashioning in Female Portraiture in Viceregal New Spain, 1700–1821,” seeks to broaden our understanding of portraiture as a genre and offer a more equitable picture of femininity.
Margriet Schavemaker
is professor of Media and Art in Museum Practice by special appointment at the University of Amsterdam. She is an art historian and philosopher, who specializes in modern and contemporary culture and museums, with a special focus on counterculture, feminism, diversity, and inclusion. In addition, she was the artistic director of the Amsterdam Museum from March 2019 until May 2024 and has been the general director of the Kunstmuseum Den Haag, Fotomuseum Den Haag, KM21 and Escher at The Palace since June 2024.
Joanna Sheers Seidenstein
is Assistant Curator in the Department of Drawings and Prints at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. She earned her PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University in 2018 and held the Stanley H. Durwood Foundation Curatorial Fellowship at the Harvard Art Museums from 2018 to 2022. Previous projects include Divine Encounter: Rembrandt’s Abraham and the Angels at The Frick Collection (2017) and Crossroads: Drawing the Dutch Landscape at the Harvard Art Museums (2022).
Eveline Sint Nicolaas
studied Socio-Economic History and Cultural Studies at the University of Amsterdam and started working at the Rijksmuseum in 1998. A key area of focus in her work is the relationship between the Netherlands and Brazil, Suriname, and the Dutch Caribbean. She was head of the curatorial team of the exhibition Slavery (2021) and chair of the Terminology working group from 2015–2021. Besides her specialization in the transatlantic world, Eveline has published widely on a diverse range of subjects, including Dutch-Ottoman relations, the object as a historical source, and the set-up of historical museums.
Toni Giselle Stuart
works as poet, performer, and writing teacher. Her work is published in Poetry, & Callaloo, among other journals and anthologies. She has an MA in Creative Writing and Education (Distinction) from Goldsmiths, University of London, where she was a Chevening Scholar.
Elizabeth Sutton
is Professor of Art History and Head of the Department of Art at the University of Northern Iowa. She has published and edited many books and articles on globalization and power in art, as well as art education. Her current interests include various interdisciplinary projects that seek to amplify feminist research, methodology, and pedagogy.
Claudia Swan
joined the faculty at Washington University in St. Louis as the inaugural Mark Steinberg Weil Professor of Art History & Archaeology in 2021. Her most recent publications are Rarities of These Lands. Art, Trade, and Diplomacy in the Dutch Republic, published by Princeton University Press in 2021, and the co-authored volume Conchophilia. Shells, Art, and Curiosity in Early Modern Europe (2021/pb 2023). She is currently co-editing two books with colleagues; one is on early modern conceptions of the elements and the arts, Elemental Forces in Early Modern Culture, and the other is Thinking Inside the Box: Early Modern Cabinets, Chests, Cases. She is also working on two books of her own; one is A Short History of the Imagination and the other is A Taste for Blackness. Ebony in the Dutch Republic.
Angela Vanhaelen
is professor of art history in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Her book Opacity: Blackness and the Art of the Dutch Republic is forthcoming with Penn State University Press. She is also the author of The Moving Statues of 17th-century Amsterdam: Automata, Waxworks, Fountains, Labyrinths, was published by Penn State University Press in 2022. With Bronwen Wilson, she is principal investigator of the research initiative Making Green Worlds: Early Modern Art and Ecologies of Globalization, which is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Vanhaelen’s 2012 book, The Wake of Iconoclasm: Painting the Church in the Dutch Republic, was awarded the Bainton prize.
Natalia Ángeles Vieyra
is an art historian and a curator who studies the art and material culture of the United States, Latin America, and the Caribbean from the eighteenth century to the present. She has contributed and curated exhibitions at the Harvard Art Museums, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, and has held fellowships at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Winterthur Museum and Library. She received her PhD from Temple University in Philadelphia, where her research centered on the work of Francisco Oller and Impressionism in the Caribbean and received the support of the Terra Foundation of American Art. She is currently the Associate Curator of Latinx Art at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.
Carine Zaayman
is a researcher and research coordinator at the Research Center for Material Culture of the Wereldmuseum in the Netherlands. She is an artist, curator and scholar committed to critical engagement with colonial archives and collections, specifically those holding strands of Khoekhoe pasts. Bringing intangible and neglected histories into view is a key motivation for her work. Her research aims to contribute to a radical reconsideration of colonial archives and museum collections, especially by assisting in finding ways to release their hold over our imaginations when we narrate the past, as well as how we might shape futures from it. She obtained a PhD in Fine Art from the University of Cape Town in 2019 and worked as a senior lecturer for its Michaelis School of Fine Art and the Centre for Curating the Archive until then.
Diva Zumaya
is the Associate Curator of European Art at the Huntington in San Marino, California. Before her appointment to this position at the Huntington in 2024, Diva worked as an Assistant and later Associate Curator of European Painting and Sculpture at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). At LACMA, she curated the exhibition The World Made Wondrous: The Dutch Collector’s Cabinet and the Politics of Possession (2023), for which she wrote an accompanying catalogue. Prior coming to LACMA as a Wallis Annenberg Postdoctoral Fellow in 2018, she held positions at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and the Art, Design, and Architecture Museum at UC Santa Barbara, where she co-curated Sacred Art in the Age of Contact: Chumash and Latin American Traditions in Santa Barbara (2017). She received her PhD in seventeenth-century Dutch art from UC Santa Barbara in 2018, writing a dissertation entitled “We are bent, not broken by the waves: Clandestine Devotion and Community
Perseverance in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Catholic Visual Culture.”