About Me | Adventures

Hey, there! I’m Lauren. I am a recovering professor of Art History living in Portland, OR. I’ve done a little bit of this and that. I am off on new, exciting adventures that focus on making art history accessible to people younger than 18. I’ve spent many years thinking about accessibility for college-age students and adults, but for the past few years I’ve spent more and more time mulling over how to get kids/tweens/teens engaged with art history. This led me to co-found ARTSQ with a few other amazing and inspiring art historians. We are on a quest to bring world history to life through art for the young and young-at-heart! I am also hard at work developing new types of non-fiction and fiction books that revolve around art history. It has been a wild ride! My current projects include a series about Disneyland art history and a fiction series about two sister sleuths who solve mysteries related to, you guessed it, art history. You can find out more over on my public author website: lkilroyewbank.com.

A little it more about me . . .

I was an Associate Professor of Art History at Pepperdine University in Malibu, CA. Before that, I was an Assistant Professor of Art History at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center within CUNY. I have also taught at UCLA and the University of Oregon. For a few years I was the Dean of Content and Strategy at Smarthistory. You will likely see some changes to this website soon enough, so stay tuned! As an art historian, I specialize in the art and architecture of the Spanish Colonial Americas (think Mexico and most of South America, 1492–1821), the Global Renaissance, and the (later) Pre-Columbian Americas. I have taught a wide variety of courses, from world art history surveys to specialized seminars. My research has focused on images of the body and body parts, the intersection of art and science, the visual culture of death and dying, and transcultural pathways—among other things! I wrote a book about the images of the Sacred Heart in Colonial Mexico. I co-edited another book about suffering and pain in the early modern world and another about emotions, art, and Christianity in Europe and the Spanish Americas. I have also been the General Editor for the born-digital world art history textbook, Reframing Art History (on Smarthistory), which is a collaboration with more than 50 specialists writing chapters in their areas of expertise. I write middle grade fiction and non-fiction books about art-history related matters! You can read more about that here. I have long been interested in digital art history and the digital humanities more broadly, as much of this site details. I have spent more time than I care to admit reading books about pedagogy. Teaching has been and will always be one of my great loves. I am the proud mama of a two wild, adventurous, and silly kids. They keep me on my toes and remind me (every day) that there is more to life than work. They are the inspiration for much of what I do. If you want to read more about my scholarship, here are a few things: (You can also go look at academia.edu, but I am not great at updating that!) BOOKS PUBLISHED

Lauren G. Kilroy-Ewbank and Heather Graham, eds., Emotions, Art, and Christianity in the Transatlantic World, 1450–1800, vol. 57, Brill’s Studies on Art, Art History and Intellectual History (BSAI) (Leiden: Brill, 2021). Link to book on Brill’s website.

Lauren G. Kilroy-Ewbank, Holy Organ or Unholy Idol?: The Sacred Heart in Art, Religion, and Culture of New Spain (Leiden: Brill, 2018). Link to book on Brill’s website.Reviews in Journal of Jesuit Studies 6, no. 3 (2019); Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture (2020)

Lauren G. Kilroy-Ewbank and Heather Graham, eds., Visualizing Sensuous Suffering and Affective Pain in Early Modern Europe and the Americas, vol. 24, Brill’s Studies on Art, Art History and Intellectual History (BSAI) (Leiden: Brill, 2018). xix + 428 pp. Link to book on Brill’s website.

ARTICLES/CHAPTERS PUBLISHED

“Decolonizing ‘The Digital’ in the Classroom: Reflections on the Intersection of Colonial Latin American Art History and Digital Art History Pedagogy,” Digital Humanities Quarterly, special issue on Digital Humanities and Colonial Latin American Studies.http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/14/4/000494/000494.html “Orozco, José Clemente,” for the Encyclopedia of Bible and Its Reception, vol. O (DeGruyter, 2023). “An introduction to the entangled history of emotions, art, and religion in the early modern world,” for Lauren G. Kilroy-Ewbank and Heather Graham, Art, Emotions, and Religion in the Transatlantic World, 1500–1800 (Leiden: Brill, 2021). “To Weep with Mary and Mourn for Christ: Luis de Morales and the Emotional Community of Badajoz, Spain” for Lauren G. Kilroy-Ewbank and Heather Graham, Art, Emotions, and Religion in the Transatlantic World, 1500–1800 (Leiden: Brill, 2021). “Doing Digital Art History in a Pre-Columbian Art History Survey Classroom: Creating an Omeka Exhibition around the Mixtec Codex Zouche-Nuttall,” Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy for the special issue on Digital Art History, issue 12 (2018). Link. “Love Hurts: Mystical Marriage in the Art of New Spain,” in Lauren G. Kilroy-Ewbank and Heather Graham, eds., Visualizing Sensuous Suffering and Affective Pain in Early Modern Europe and the Americas, vol. 24, Brill’s Studies on Art, Art History and Intellectual History (BSAI) (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 313–357. “Introduction: Visualizing Sensuous Suffering and Affective Pain in Early Modern Europe and the Americas,” co-authored with Heather Graham, in Lauren G. Kilroy-Ewbank and Heather Graham, eds., Visualizing Sensuous Suffering and Affective Pain in Early Modern Europe and the Americas, vol. 24, Brill’s Studies on Art, Art History and Intellectual History (BSAI) (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 1–34. “‘For all the world to see’: Guaman Poma’s Self-Portraits in Nueva corónica,” The Americas: A Quarterly Review of Latin American History 75, no. 1 (January 2018): 47–94. https://doi.org/10.1017/tam.2017.97 Contributor to Paintings of Colonial Cusco: Artistic Splendor in the Andes/Pintura colonial cusqueña: El esplendor del arte en los Andes, ed. Ananda Cohen Suarez (Cusco: Haynanka Ediciones, 2016). Bilingual entries include: “52: Baby Jesus with Instruments of the Passion,” “94: Song of Songs,” “97: Allegory of the Sacred Heart of Jesus,” “98: Death of a Virtuous Man and Death of a Sinner,” “152: Saint Mary Magdalene.” “Science, Art, and the Sacred Heart in Eighteenth-Century New Spain,” in Vanishing Boundaries: Scientific Knowledge and Art Production in the Early Modern Era, ed. Lilian Zirpolo, 223–260 (Woodcliff Lake, NJ: WAPACC Organization, 2015). “Holy Organ or Unholy Idol? Forming a History of the Sacred Heart in New Spain,” Colonial Latin American Review 23, no. 3 (Dec. 2014): 320–359, DOI: 10.1080/10609164.2014.972698 “A Burning Heart Can Save Your Soul,” in Death and the Afterlife in the Early Modern Hispanic World, edited by John Beusterien and Constance Cortez (University of Minnesota Press: Hispanic Issues On Line, 2010), ISSN 1931-8006.

IN-PRESS

“Pietà” for the Encyclopedia of Bible and Its Reception (DeGruyter, forthcoming). This essay (formerly “Lamentation of Jesus” will now be published in the “P” volume under Pietà due to changes with the editor.

PUBLIC-FACING WORK I have published extensively on Smarthistory, so I direct you to my author page—it would be too unwieldy to list them all here.