Tuesday October 6, 2026 : Dr. Huey Copeland
University of Pittsburgh
Dr. Huey Copeland is the Andrew W. Mellon Chair and Professor of Art History. Copeland’s work interrogates African/Diasporic, American and European artistic praxis from the late 18th-century to the present with an emphasis on articulations of blackness in the Western visual field. In his interdisciplinary research, Copeland focuses on the intersections of race and gender, subject and object, the aesthetic and its others from a black feminist perspective that reveals the biases and elisions of the discipline. Rather than assume the redemptive power of art, he aims to push history against the grain in exploring the constitutive relationship between the capture of black life and the production of cultural property in the modern transatlantic world.
 
Friday February 5, 2027: Dr. Mariachiara Gasparini
University of Oregon
Dr. Mariachiara Gasparini is an Associate Professor of Chinese Art and Architectural History. She studied Oriental Languages and Civilization at the University of Oriental Studies in Naples, Italy, earned an M.A. in East Asian Art History from Sotheby’s Institute of Art in London, U.K., and received her Ph.D. in Transcultural Studies: Global Art History from Ruprecht Karls University of Heidelberg, Germany. Gasparini’s research focuses on Chinese and Central Asian textiles, material culture, wall painting, artists’ praxis, and Sino-Iranian and Turko-Mongol interactions. She is the author of Transcending Patterns: Silk Road Cultural and Artistic Interactions through Central Asian Textiles (University of Hawai’i Press, 2019). 

Friday February 19, 2027 : Dr. Alexandra Makin
Manchester Metropolitan University
Dr. Alexandra Makin is a Third Century Research Fellow. She was a post-doctoral researcher for three years on the AHRC funded ‘Unwrapping the Galloway Hoard’ project, which was run by National Museums Scotland and the University of Glasgow. Makin received her PhD from the University of Manchester where she focused on embroidery and its context in Britain and Ireland during the early medieval period (450-1100 CE).
 
Thursday April 8, 2027 : Dr. Rachel Patt
University of Notre Dame
Dr. Rachel Patt is an Assistant Professor of Art History. Patt is a historian of ancient Mediterranean and Late Antique art and visual culture. Her scholarship aims to reveal the real historiographic stakes of studying art history in today’s rapidly technologizing society by asserting that art, as a distinctly human endeavor, can illuminate how we understand ourselves and our world, concerns at the heart of humanistic inquiry. Patt’s first book project, Intimate Encounters: Memory, Pothos, and Portraiture in the Premodern Mediterranean, recasts Roman portraiture and the emergence of the Byzantine icon tradition by positioning pothos, the longing desire for an absent beloved, as a heuristic tool for illuminating those genres. Patt is presently developing a second book project provisionally titled Vanquished Nature: An Ecological Ethics of Roman Luxury that takes up a line of inquiry latent in her first monograph: the costs of Roman art on both the environment and its human makers.
 
Friday April 23, 2027  : Dr. Stephen Whiteman
The Courtauld Institute of Art
Dr. Stephen Whiteman is a Professor of the Art and Architecture of China and Co-Editor-in-Chief of The Art Bulletin. Whiteman’s research and teaching focuses on the visual and spatial cultures of early modern China in their global contexts, and on the application of computational methods and digital media in the research and publication of art and architectural history. His current monograph, Under Heaven and Within the Seas: Mapping China Since 1000 (Reaktion), draws on art history and cultural geography to explore the changing political and cultural stakes of landscape and territory in China from the perspective of a transcultural history of cartography.
 
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