Art Historian
I am an art historian specializing on the visual, material, and religious cultures of Africa, Latin America, and Europe in the early modern period (1500-1800). My scholarship sheds light on the cross-cultural ebbs and flows that unfolded during this period across and around the Atlantic Ocean. My research and writing center on African expressive, spiritual, and material cultures and their ramifications in Latin America and Europe, demonstrating how the often violent, but vital connections between the three continents gave contours to the early modern world and continue to shape our own times.
In current projects, I investigate the nature and material manifestations of political and spiritual power in the era of chattel slavery, the aesthetic entanglements that the Atlantic slave trade created and sustained between Europe and Africa, and the conditions of visibility and invisibility of colonialism and racialized slavery in France’s public monuments and collections from the seventeenth century to today.
I am the author of several award-winning books, including The Art of Conversion: Christian Visual Culture in the Kingdom of Kongo (2014) and Images on a Mission in Early Modern Kongo and Angola (2022). The latter appeared alongside two digital-humanities publications (find them here and here). Co-authorship and editorship are central to her field-building scholarly practice. I have edited, co-edited and co-authored several essays and volumes, including the book Afro-Catholic Festivals in the Americas Performance, Representation, and the Making of Black Atlantic Tradition and, with Esther Chadwick, a special issue of the journal Art History on the theme of the Vast Atlantic.
My work also unfolds at the intersection of art and scholarship. Recent projects in this realm include Debris of History, Matters of Memory a collaboration with Gloria Cabral and Sammy Baloji at the 2023 Venice Architectural Biennial.
Beyond academia, I collaborate internationally with museums and other public-facing institutions on publications, exhibitions, and programming aimed at broad audiences. She lends her expertise to news stories and media productions in venues such as Netflix, NPR, PBS, Arte, the New York Times, and Le Monde.
Support for my research and writing include grants and fellowships from the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, the Michigan Society of Fellows, the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board, the Yale Institute of Sacred Music, the Renaissance Society of America, and the Paris Institute for Advanced Studies. I am a 2018 Rome Prize fellow of the American Academy in Rome. In Spring 2022, I was a fellow at I Tatti – The Harvard University’s Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence, and will join the Center again as a Visiting Professor in 2024-2025.
At Harvard, I advise emerging scholars in our graduate program whose research explores different aspects of the visual and material cultures of Africa, Latin America, and the Atlantic World in the early modern period and the long shadow this era cast on our contemporary times.
Born and raised in Martinique, my ancestors came to the island from Africa, South Asia, and Burgundy. I graduated from Sciences-Po Paris before receiving my AM and PhD from Harvard.
CV (opens in a new window)
Contact: fromont@fas.harvard.edu