Barbara E. Mundy

Barbara E. Mundy holds the Donald and Martha Robertson Chair in Latin American Art History at Tulane University, and is proud to have been part of MAVCOR since its inception. Her scholarship dwells in zones of contact between Native peoples and settler colonists as they forged new visual cultures in the Americas. She been particularly interested in the social construction of space and its imaginary, which was the subject of her first book, The Mapping of New Spain (Chicago, 1996). Her most recent book, The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, the Life of Mexico City (Texas, 2015), 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. This book received many awards, including the 2017 Latin American Studies Association (LASA) Bryce Wood Award for an outstanding book on Latin America in the social sciences and humanities published in English. Her work spans both digital and traditional formats. With Dana Leibsohn, she is the creator of Vistas: Visual Culture in Spanish America, 1520-1820. She has held fellowships at Dumbarton Oaks, the National Gallery of Art, the John Carter Brown Library and the Library of Congress, where she held the 2021-22 Kislak Chair.  She is on the editorial board of Estudios de cultura náhuatl.