Dr. Paul Niell is a scholar of the art, architecture, and visual culture of the late eighteenth and nineteenth-century Hispanophone. He has written on the adaptation of Beaux-Artes classicism and fine arts academies to the Caribbean settings of Cuba and Puerto Rico, where slavery and race became constituent aspects of the production and reception of the fine arts. As an author, his work is invested in slavery studies, Atlantic studies, historical materialism, colonial studies, critical heritage studies, architectural history, and the study of the Euro-American classical tradition. He teaches courses in the Visual Cultures of the Americas program in the Department of Art History at Florida State University where he is Associate Professor. He is the author of Urban Space as Heritage in Late Colonial Cuba: Classicism and Dissonance on the Plaza de Armas of Havana, 1754-1828 (University of Texas Press, 2015) and co-editor with Stacie G. Widdifield of Buen Gusto and Classicism in the Visual Cultures of Latin American, 1780-1910 (University of New Mexico Press, 2013). His work appears in The Art Bulletin, Colonial Latin American Review, The Latin Americanist, and the Bulletin of Latin American Research.
Dr. Niell is co-director, along with Dr. Stella Nair of the University of California, Los Angeles of the 2022/2023 core program for the Center of 17th and 18th Century Studies at the UCLA Clark Library titled, “The Forgotten Canopy: Ecology, Ephemeral Architecture, and Imperialism in the Caribbean, South American, and Transatlantic Worlds.” His most recent work includes the study of an ephemeral form of architecture known as the “bohío” in the Hispanophone Caribbean in dialogue with Beaux Artes classicism and in relation to processes of empire and national identity formation.
The program he participated in was titled: Paradises Lost: Colonization of Landscapes and Destruction of Eco-Anthoposystems. Read more here (in French)
More info: https://www.inha.fr/fr/recherche/chercheurs-invites.html
Paul Niell joined SAH in 2009. Hew was awarded the Edilia and François-Auguste de Montêquin Fellowship as a Senior Scholar in 2022 and has served on the de Montêquin Fellowship Committee and as a session chair at the SAH 2020 Virtual Conference.
