The Department of History of Art and Architecture is delighted to announce the appointment of Cécile Fromont as a professor in our department. Born in Martinique, and with degrees from Science-Po and Harvard, Fromont has published field-changing books on the Christian visual culture of early modern Kongo and Angola and on Afro-Catholic festivals in the Americas. “One of the great challenges of today’s Humanities,” writes HAA Chair Joseph Leo Koerner, “is to forge a new conception of the global. In the objects and performances she elects to study, and in capacious and original ways she studies these, Fromont has become an undisputed leader in our discipline. Her arrival to Harvard will be a pivotal moment in our department’s history.” Fromont comes to Harvard from Yale University, where as Professor of African and South Atlantic Art, she has taught on the visual, material, and religious cultures of African and Latin America, with special focus on the early modern period, the Portuguese-speaking Atlantic, and the slave trade.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard, said: “The Cooper Gallery is the single space at Harvard dedicated to the exhibition of works by artists throughout the African Diaspora. Its vibrancy will only be enhanced by the presence of its first faculty director, Cécile Fromont, an art historian whose seminal, pioneering scholarship in the history of both African and Afro-Latin American art has contributed so much to a sophisticated understanding of the visual and social practices throughout the African Diaspora, stretching back centuries and looking forward to the present and future. There is no scholar working in the academy today who has a greater command of several artistic traditions on both sides of the Atlantic.”
Fromont writes: “It is a joy to be joining the Harvard community as a professor in the history of art and architecture department and the first Faculty Director of the Cooper Gallery of African and African American Art at the Hutchins Center. I will step into these new roles energized and inspired by the wondrous possibilities they afford for my scholarship to grow and take new forms in dialogue with learners and thinkers within and beyond the university. My ongoing research focuses on power, aesthetics, and visibility in and of African expressive, spiritual, and material cultures within the ebbs and flows of the early modern Atlantic world. I particularly look forward to working alongside emerging scholars in Harvard’s undergraduate and graduate programs whose work will chart new paths for the study of Africa, Latin America, and the early modern period."
[Update 04/10/24: corrected Cécile's title.]