Cécile Fromont is an assistant professor in Art History and the College at the University of Chicago. Her writing and teaching focuses on the visual, material, and religious culture of Africa and Latin America with a special emphasis on the early modern period (ca 1500-1800) and on the Portuguese-speaking Atlantic World. Her first book, The Art of Conversion: Christian Visual Culture in the Kingdom of Kongo was published in 2014 by the University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute for Early American History. Her essays on African and Latin American art have appeared, among other venue, in the Colonial Latin American Review, African Arts, RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics as well as various edited volumes and exhibition catalogues. Support for her 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, and the Yale Institute of Sacred Music.

She is currently pursuing two lines of research investigating areas of intersection between visual and material culture, religion, and knowledge creation in cross-cultural environments of early modern Africa and Latin America. The first project is a study of Franciscan Capuchin images of Kongo and Angola composed between 1650 and 1750 that examines the formation and communication of cross-cultural knowledge and the second an investigation of the circulation of African visual, material, and religious culture in the early modern Atlantic world.