Cécile Fromont

Invited Researcher of DEA Programme Stay in France from October 1st to November 30th, 2020

Cécile Fromont is an associate professor in the history of art department at Yale University. Her writing and teaching focus 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. She is the author of The Art of Conversion: Christian Visual Culture in the Kingdom of Kongo (2014), translated into French in 2018. She is also the editor as well as a contributor to the 2019 volume Afro-Catholic Festivals in the Americas: Performance, Representation, and the Making of Black Atlantic Tradition. She is a 2020-2021 fellow of the Paris Institute for Advanced Studies.

Title: Connected by Design: Material and Aesthetic Exchange between Africa and Europe in the Era of the Slave Trade

Keywords: African and Latin American Art History, Atlantic World, Early modern period, Slave trade

Afro-Catholic Festivals in the Americas: Performance, Representation, and the Making of Black Atlantic Tradition (Penn State University Press, Africana Religion Series, 2019)
L’Art de la conversion. Culture visuelle chrétienne dans le royaume du Kongo (Les Presses du Réel, 2018)
"Paper, Ink, Vodun, and the Inquisition: Tracing Power, Slavery, and Witchcraft in the Early Modern Portuguese Atlantic." Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 88, 2 (2020): 460-504.
"Common Threads: Cloth, Colour, and the Slave Trade in Early Modern Kongo and Angola." Art History 41, 5 (2018): 838-867.
"Tecido estrangeiro, hábitos Locais: indumentária, insignias reais, e a arte da conversão no início da era moderna do reino do Congo. Foreign Cloth, Local Habits: Clothing, Regalia, and the Art of Conversion in the Early Modern Kingdom of Kongo." Anais do Museu Paulista 25, 2 (2017): 11-53.

Published at 20 October 2020