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.

Worcester College has a strong history of teaching and research in the visual arts, from its unrivalled special collections of prints and drawings to the Scott Opler Junior Research Fellowship in Renaissance and Baroque Architecture which was established in 2000. The College has also been home to a decade-long visiting professorship in partnership with the Department of the History of Art and the Terra Foundation for American Art – a position held by Professor Villaseñor Black in 2021-22.

Between 2016 and 2025, the Terra Visiting Professorship has demonstrated both the enriching interdisciplinarity of art historical research in a collegiate setting and the importance of dedicated teaching and research on the art of the Americas within the University. As we reach the end of this fruitful partnership, we are delighted to now permanently endow a new College fellowship that will continue the vital work of expanding Art History’s traditional geographic, material and methodological boundaries.

Professor Villaseñor Black will contribute substantially to the teaching and research profile of the Department and College at a time when the humanities in Oxford are thriving. Her arrival will coincide with the Department’s move to the flagship Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities in the heart of Jericho. Based in this new centre of scholarship and teaching – and as a Fellow of Oxford’s Rothermere American Institute (RAI) – she will be ideally placed to forge new ties across the collegiate University’s research centres focusing on the history, culture and politics of the Americas.

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.

Worcester’s new Tutorial Fellowship in History of Art has been endowed by Honorary Fellow David Loevner (1976, Economics) and his wife Catherine. We owe a debt of gratitude to David and Catherine for their far-sighted championing of teaching and research in Art History, in addition to their long-term support of the College, its people and its vision.