Virtual Salon: The Evolving Archive, Part 1
Please join us on Friday, October 3 at 11am Eastern Time for the Virtual Salon, “The Evolving Archive, part 1.” This online event is organized by Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide and is part of a series of online events cosponsored by the Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art (AHNCA) and the Dahesh Museum of Art. It is free and open to the public, but registration is required: https://tinyurl.com/Evolving-Archive.
The nineteenth century is particularly rich in primary texts, such as books, periodicals, letters, and other records that form the basis for original and innovative scholarship. This first installment of a two-part series will bring together four distinguished researchers who work with different types of archives to fulfill the varying goals of their projects. They will share with us the kind of archives they consult, the aim of their archival research, and how they strategize for making the most of digital and in-person resources. The panel will be moderated by Isabel L. Taube, Co-Managing Editor, and Kimberly Orcutt, Executive Editor, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide.
Mia L. Bagneris is Associate Professor of Art History and Africana Studies and the Chair of the Department of Africana Studies at Tulane University. She is the author of Colouring the Caribbean: Race and the Art of Agostino Brunias (Manchester University Press, 2017), co-author of Reframing Black Art: Case Studies in Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture (Routledge, forthcoming), and currently wrapping up her third book, Imagining the Oriental South: The Enslaved Mixed-Race Beauty in British Culture, c1865–1900. With colleague Stephanie Porras, she developed and leads the Crossroads Cohort, an interdisciplinary graduate program in art and Africana studies that is supported by a one-million-dollar grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Nancy Karrels is Associate Director of Provenance Research and Object Histories at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Asian Art, where she oversees the museum’s provenance research efforts and provides strategic guidance on repatriations, national and international provenance collaborations, and internal policy development. She has published widely on provenance research and curated the exhibition, “Provenance: A Forensic History of Art” at the Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She holds a PhD in art history from the University of Illinois and a J.D. from McGill University Law School.
Allison Morehead is Professor of Art History, Queen’s University, Canada, and works at the intersections of art history, gender studies, history of medicine, and the medical humanities, pursuing research on art and the medicalization of modern life. Morehead is the author of Nature’s Experiments and the Search for Symbolist Form (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017), the curator and catalogue editor of Lifeblood/Livsblod – Edvard Munch (MUNCH, Oslo, 2025), and the co-editor of Art and the Critical Medical Humanities (Bloomsbury, Series: Critical Interventions in the Medical and Health Humanities, forthcoming 2026).
Oscar E. Vázquez is Professor of Art History at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He has performed archival research on three continents for his studies of eighteenth- through early-twentieth-century Latin American and Spanish visual cultures. Vázquez is the author of Inventing the Art Collection: Patrons, Markets and the State in Nineteenth-Century Spain (Penn State University Press, 2001), The End Again: Degeneration and Visual Culture in Modern Spain (Penn State University Press, 2017), editor and author of Academies and Schools of Art in Latin America (Routledge, 2020), and co-editor, with Peter Lukehart and Ulrich Pfisterer, of Art Academies: Europe and the Americas, ca. 1600–1900 (forthcoming 2026).