Michael Schreffler
Associate Professor & Department Chair
mschreff@vcu.edu
Michael Schreffler is a specialist in the art and architecture of colonial Latin America, c. 1500-1800. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 2000, the same year he joined the faculty at VCU. He has received research fellowships from the J. William Fulbright Program, the Getty Foundation, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. His research examines the ties that bind representation to political theory and governance in the early modern Hispanic world. His book, The Art of Allegiance: Visual Culture and Imperial Power in Baroque New Spain (Penn State University Press, 2007) explores the ways in which visual images and texts gave shape to Spanish Imperial authority in New Spain (colonial Mexico) in the seventeenth century. He has also published essays on images of the Conquest of Mexico, early modern conceptualizations of artistic practice in the Americas, the representation of cannibalism, and interest among twentieth-century collectors, patrons, and artists in the visual culture of the colonial period. He is currently at work on a book about the ideas and values embodied by colonial architecture in Cuzco, Peru in early modernity and in the present.
Michael Schreffler is a specialist in the art and architecture of colonial Latin America, c. 1500-1800. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 2000, the same year he joined the faculty at VCU. He has received research fellowships from the J. William Fulbright Program, the Getty Foundation, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. His research examines the ties that bind representation to political theory and governance in the early modern Hispanic world. His book, The Art of Allegiance: Visual Culture and Imperial Power in Baroque New Spain (Penn State University Press, 2007) explores the ways in which visual images and texts gave shape to Spanish Imperial authority in New Spain (colonial Mexico) in the seventeenth century. He has also published essays on images of the Conquest of Mexico, early modern conceptualizations of artistic practice in the Americas, the representation of cannibalism, and interest among twentieth-century collectors, patrons, and artists in the visual culture of the colonial period. He is currently at work on a book about the ideas and values embodied by colonial architecture in Cuzco, Peru in early modernity and in the present.Professor Schreffler teaches graduate seminars on various aspects of the art and architecture of colonial and modern Latin America. Recent seminar topics have included the visual culture of sixteenth century Mexico; colonial art and architecture in Peru, c. 1534-1834; cities and space in colonial and modern Latin America; and visual culture and the state. His undergraduate courses include Colonial Art and Architecture of Latin America, Modern Art and Architecture of Latin America, and Baroque Art and Architecture in Southern Europe. He has also served as a co-director of VCU’s summer study abroad program in Peru since 2002.
Selected Publications:
The Art of Allegiance: Visual Culture and Imperial Power in Baroque New Spain. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2007.
“‘To Live in This City is to Die’: Death and Architecture in Colonial Cuzco, Peru.” In Death and Afterlife in the Early Modern Hispanic World, edited by John Beusterien and Constance Cortez. Special issue of HIOL: Hispanic Issues Online (Sept. 2010). http://hispanicissues.umn.edu/DeathandAfterlife.html
Co-authored with Jessica Welton, “Garcilaso de la Vega and the ‘New Peruvian Man’: José Sabogal’s frescoes at the Hotel Cuzco.” Art History 33, no. 1 (Feb. 2010), 125-49.
“’Their Cortés and Our Cortés’: Spanish Colonialism and Aztec Representation.” Art Bulletin 91, no. 4 (Dec. 2009): 407-25.
“Representing the Conquest of Mexico in the Seventeenth-Century Empire of the Spanish Hapsburgs.” In Rebecca Brienen and Margaret Jackson, eds., Invasion and Transformation: Perspectives on the Conquest of Mexico. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2007, 103-24.
“Emblems of Virtue in Eighteenth-Century New Spain.” In Kellen McIntyre and Richard Phillips eds., Woman and Art in Early Modern Latin America. Leiden: Brill, 2006, 265-87.
“Vespucci Rediscovers America and the Pictorial Rhetoric of Cannibalism.” Art History 28, no.3 (June 2005): 295-310.
“’No Lord Without Vassals, Nor Vassals Without a Lord’: The Royal Palace and the Shape of Kingly Power in Viceregal Mexico City.” Oxford Art Journal 27, no. 2 (2004): 155-171.
“New Spanish Art in the Weddell Collection in Richmond, Virginia, U.S.A.: A Preliminary Catalog.” Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, vol. 23, no. 80 (2002): 1-35.
Undergraduate Courses:
- Colonial Art & Architecture of Latin America
- Baroque in Southern Europe
- Modern & Contemporary Art & Architecture of Latin America
- Honors Survey of Western Art
Graduate Courses
- Latin American Renaissance Art & Architecture
- Latin American Art
- Latin American Art & Architecture
