The art history faculty at LSU are excited to welcome Assistant Professor Elena FitzPatrick Sifford, who will teach Renaissance and Baroque art. Before coming to LSU, Sifford was a visiting instructor of art history at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and a graduate teaching fellow in art history at Lehman College in New York.

Sifford’s research focuses on the introduction, development, and spread of Christian devotional sculpture in colonial Latin America. Her dissertation, “Disseminating Devotion: The Image and Cult of the Black Christ in Colonial Mexico and Central America,” investigates the intersections of pre-Columbian, African, and Iberian ritual and cosmology as it relates to miraculous pilgrimage images of the Black Christ. Her research deals with materiality and the exchange of visual culture and ideas in the age of exploration, particularly within the Spanish empire. Sifford has presented her research in New York, New Orleans, Washington, D.C., and Mexico City. She also contributed a chapter on hybridity and Mexican feather work in the volume ReVisioning: Critical Methods of Seeing Christianity in the History of Art, edited by James Romaine and Linda Stratford (Cascade Books, 2014).

Sifford received a BA from Oberlin College and a Master of Philosophy and PhD from City University of New York Graduate Center.

Visit design.lsu.edu/programs/art-history for more information about the art history program at LSU.