Professor Charlene Villaseñor Black

Professor Charlene Villaseñor Black has been appointed as the first Loevner Fellow & Tutor in History of Art at Worcester College thanks to the generous support of David and Catherine Loevner. She also takes up the new position of Professor in the Art of the Americas in Oxford’s Department of the History of Art.

Professor Villaseñor Black is a world-renowned authority on the art of Central and South America in the early modern period, as well as of contemporary Latino/a art across the Americas. She currently chairs the César E. Chávez Department of Chicana/o and Central American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where she has been a full professor since 2014.

As a scholar of the highest distinction, with impressive records of publication and grant capture, Professor Villaseñor Black brings to Oxford her research on the politics of religious art and global exchange. Actively engaged in the Chicana/o art scene, her upbringing as a working-class, Catholic Chicana from Arizona forged her identity as a border-crossing early modernist and inspirational teacher.

Professor Villaseñor-Black received her PhD from the University of Michigan in 1995. Her first major monograph, Creating the Cult of Saint Joseph: Art and Gender in the Spanish Empire, was published by Princeton University Press in 2006. Her latest monographs are Transforming Saints: From Spain to New Spain (2022) and The Artist as Eyewitness: Antonio Bernal Papers, 1884-2019, which won the Gold Medal for Best Biography in English in the International Latino Book Awards. She has also recently co-edited The Routledge Companion to Decolonizing Art History (2023).

Adept at securing research grant funding, Professor Villaseñor Black has served as Principal Investigator (PI) for a $100k Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Grant on the project ‘Affirming Multivocal Humanities’ (2023-26). She has also received more than $1M as co-PI for a multi-campus research initiative on California’s colonial missions funded by the University of California (2019-22), and has been awarded a $100k Getty Foundation Exhibition Research Grant for a project on ecocritical approaches to the material histories of exploration (2020-23). She is currently planning a related exhibition entitled ‘Verdant Worlds,’ using an eco-critical approach to the material and visual cultures of exploration in the Americas from the early modern period to the present day.