About the Chair

The Kislak Chair supports in-depth research projects in the disciplines of archaeology, history, cartography, epigraphy, linguistics, ethno-history, ethnography, bibliography, and sociology, with an emphasis on interdisciplinary projects that combine disciplines in novel and productive ways. With a focus on the Western Hemisphere, the Chair may consider regions from the Arctic to Patagonia, including the Caribbean; from the eras before the arrival of Europeans to about 1825; and regarding themes as diverse as the histories of indigenous peoples, colonial and post-colonial movements, the geopolitics of empire, including among others those of France, England, Spain, and Portugal, new routes of trade and modes of commerce, and issues relating to environmental history and exposure to novel flora and fauna.

By encouraging broad interdisciplinary enquiry, the Kislak Chair helps to nourish a broad conversation ranging from the technical aspects of archeological discovery to issues of interest in the current cultural conversation. The annually appointed chair also helps to convene scholars, invited by the chair for seminars, consultations, and ongoing study of the artifacts in the Kislak Collection.

Current Chair

Barbara E. Mundy

Barbara E. Mundy is an art historian whose scholarship dwells in zones of contact between Native peoples and settler colonists as they forged new visual cultures in the Americas. She is Donald and Martha Robertson Chair in Latin American Art History at Tulane University, Senior Fellow of Pre-Columbian Studies at Dumbarton Oaks, and serves on the editorial board of Estudios de cultura náhuatl. Mundy is also the incoming president of the American Society for Ethnohistory. Her most recent book, “The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, the Life of Mexico City,” draws on Indigenous texts and representations to counter a colonialist historiography and to argue for the city’s nature as an Indigenous city through the sixteenth century. With Dana Leibsohn, she is the creator of Vistas: Visual Culture in Spanish America, 1520-1820. Her project at the Kluge Center is titled “Indigenous Artists and European Book Culture, 1540-1600.”