Cécile Fromont has been appointed as a new professor in Harvard University’s Department of History of Art and Architecture and the first faculty director of the Cooper Gallery of African and African American Art at the Hutchins Center.
Born in Martinique and holding degrees from Science-Po and Harvard, Fromont has published groundbreaking 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 Africa and Latin America, with a special focus on the early modern period, the Portuguese-speaking Atlantic and the slave trade.
