Dr. Alejandro Nodarse Jammal

Dr. Alejandro Nodarse Jammal received their PhD in History of Art & Architecture from Harvard University in 2026, with an emphasis on early modern European art, following previous degrees at the University of Oxford (MFA, Fine Arts, 2025) and Yale University (BA/MA, History of Art, 2019). Their dissertation and forthcoming monograph, Ribera and the Operations of Painting, examines the convergence of painterly and medical practices in early modern Southern Europe through the work of Jusepe (José) de Ribera (Játiva, 1591–Naples, 1652) and his followers.

Their current research projects continue to engage the history of art production in Spain and Italy, through the eighteenth century and across a global context. Their postdoctoral research project, In Joseph’s Wake: Joseph Borbón and the Black Mediterranean, turns to the life and work of José (or Joseph) Carlos de Borbón, an enslaved painter to Charles III, King of Spain. This project offers a corrective history examining Joseph’s artistic and racial identity within eighteenth-century Naples, Madrid, and the wider Bourbon empire. In addition to the close examination and reattribution of paintings, this project reconstructs Joseph’s world—between North Africa, Italy, and Spain—through archival records of the court, theatre, art academy, and slave market.

Alejandro has held earlier positions as a predoctoral fellow at the Bibliotheca Hertziana within the Sietske Fransen Research Group Visualizing Science in Media Revolutions and remains an affiliated fellow of the Hana Gründler Research Group, Ethico-Aesthetics of the Visual, at the KHI. Their work has been supported by the Villa I Tatti (Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies) and the Custard Institute for Spanish Art and Culture, among others. Recent publications include a reassessment of Sánchez Cotán's still life painting and the affective dimensions of anatomical imaging from Pontormo to the Carracci, as well as an edited volume on memory and ecology in contemporary art. Alejandro has also gained curatorial experience at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, where their archival research brought forth new light on Thomas McKeller, John Singer Sargent’s preeminent African-American model and the subject of the 2020 exhibition, Boston’s Apollo. In addition to their art historical research, Alejandro is a practicing interdisciplinary artist and convenes the poetry reading group, Navi Incerte, in Florence.