New professor of early modern art history
The American art historian Aaron M. Hyman has been appointed professor of early modern art history at the University of Basel. His research focuses on Flemish and Dutch art and the art of the Americas, particularly from the 17th century.
08 August 2024
Aaron Hyman studied art history at Yale University and at the University of California, Berkeley, where he completed his doctorate in 2017. His doctoral work about the reception of Rubens in Latin America became the basis for Rubens in Repeat: The Logic of the Copy in Colonial Latin America, which examines the transfer of northern European prints to the Spanish Americas and analyzes the reception of these prints by artists in colonial Latin America. Published by the Getty Research Institute in 2021, the book has been recognized as an innovative, groundbreaking contribution to the development of the field and has been awarded several prizes.
In 2017, Hyman took up a tenure-track assistant professorship in the Department of the History of Art at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, USA. Hyman has received several prestigious fellowships, including from the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts and the American Council of Learned Societies. In 2023, he was a Fellow in Residence at the University of Bern as part of the European Research Council ERC-funded project “Global Horizons in Pre-modern Art.”
Much of Hyman’s research focuses on areas of cultural interaction (particularly between northern Europe and the Americas) and on media (such as prints and book arts) that have not typically been treated in art history. By exploring such transatlantic connections and focusing on underappreciated forms of artistic production he critically evaluates European art history's theoretical and historiographical traditions and establishes new conceptual frameworks.
Hyman will begin his professorship in the Department of Arts, Media, and Philosophy at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences on 1 September 2024.
