Research Bio

Todd Olson is the author of Poussin and France: Painting, Humanism and the Politics of Style (Yale University Press, 2002), Caravaggio's Pitiful Relics (Yale University Press, 2014), and Ribera's Repetitions: Paper and Canvas in Seventeenth-Century Spanish Naples. His fields of research and teaching include early modern Europe, colonial Latin America, and the trans-Atlantic world. His main areas of interest are class and sexuality in visual representation, transcultural materiality, history of art criticism and theory, and the politics of collecting. He has one book in progress: Survivals: The Migration and Transmission of Graphic Media in Early Modern Europe and the New World.  His  publications include “Markers: Le Moyne de Morgues in Sixteenth-Century Florida,” in Seeing Across Cultures in the Early Modern Period, eds. Dana Leibsohn and Jeanette F. Peterson (Ashgate, 2012), “Reproductive Horror: Sixteenth-Century Mexican Pictures in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (Oxford Art Journal), and “Abduction: The Reception and Reproduction of the Codex Mendoza in France and England” [“Abducción: la recepción y reproducción del Códice mendocino en Francia e Inglaterra (1553 -1696).”] In The Codex Mendoza. New Perspectives [El Códice Mendocino. Nuevas Perspectivas.] Edited by Jorge Gómez Tejada. Quito: USFQ Press, 2022.

He is a Fulbright Fellow (France, 1990) and a Fellow of the American Academy of Rome (Mellon Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship, 1998-99). He was the recipient of a Getty Research Institute Fellowship (2005-06) and the Bourse André Chastel, awarded by the National Institute of History of Art (INHA) and the French Academy in Rome (Villa Medici, Rome, 2010).

Research Expertise and Interest

early modern art