Faculty

Originally from Durban, South Africa, Leora Maltz-Leca teaches large lectures on global contemporary art and focused seminars on globalization, post-colonialism, race and critical theory. She is recipient of a 2016 CAA Millard Mess publication award, a 2011/2012 Getty Postdoctoral Fellowship, a 2011 Creative Capital/ Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writer's Grant and a 2010 Library of Congress Swann fellowship for her forthcoming book on William Kentridge, Process as Metaphor & Other Doubtful Enterprises. The book explores how the South African artist renders the physical processes of the studio—cutting, pasting and projecting light —as metaphors for the way we think and live. Her second book, Material Politics, focuses similarly on how some of the most compelling artists working today plumb the histories and associations of specific materials to literally materialize the political through the formal.

Alero Akporiaye teaches courses on international politics and international political economy, including political economy of global supply chains, international human rights and law, and gendered political economy. Her courses examine how international political forces affect socioeconomic processes, events and outcomes.

Akporiaye's research interests are broadly centered on the politics of foreign direct investment: political risk and multinational corporations, political economy of energy extraction, corporate social responsibility and experimental methods in international political economy.

Eric Anderson teaches courses on modern design, identity and mobility. Recent seminars have focused on the German Bauhaus school and its global aftermath, the modern interior and domesticity, interactions among design and the social sciences, and design exhibitions and media.

His research currently includes two book-length projects, one investigating design’s links to psychology and media in the 19th century and the other on modern interiors and identity. He has lectured internationally, most recently in China, Greece and the UK, and spent the spring of 2017 in Vienna as Fulbright Fellow at the Sigmund Freud Museum and visiting faculty at the University of Applied Arts.

Bolaji Campbell teaches courses on African and African Diaspora Art and Visual Culture in the Department of Theory and History of Art and Design of RISD’s Liberal Arts Division, with additional teaching and research focus on African American Art and Visual Culture. Campbell holds a PhD in art history from the University of Wisconsin, Madison and MFA and BA degrees in fine arts from the Obafemi Awolowo University (formerly University of Ife) in Ile-Ife, Nigeria. He has previously taught at Obafemi Awolowo University, the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, the University of Wisconsin, Madison and the College of Charleston in South Carolina. He has received numerous honors and awards, including the Sylvia and Pamela Coleman Fellowship, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and The Richard A. Horovitz Professional Development Fund Fellowship, Institute of International Education; and a Postdoctoral Fellowship, Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture. Campbell is listed in Marquis Who’s Who in America, Nigerian Artists: A Who’s Who and Bibliography (Smithsonian Institution) and L’Art Africain Contemporain, Guidebook to Contemporary African Art (Paris). He has published numerous essays in learned journals and as chapters in books. His most recent work is a book entitled Painting for the Gods: Art and Aesthetics of Yoruba Religious Murals (Africa World Press, 2008).

Namita Dharia is a socio-cultural anthropologist and an architect who does research on urban South Asia. Her interest in urban areas developed during her studies and career as an architect and urban designer in India in the late ’90s. Her areas of expertise range from urban political economy and environmental studies to architecture and planning and from labor and design studies to new materialisms.

Dharia is the author of The Industrial Ephemeral Labor and Love in Indian Architecture and Construction, an ethnography of the building construction industry in India’s National Capital Region. Dharia is currently working on a book length project that studies the relationship of rest and sleep to urban environments, asking what does it mean for people, spaces, and the planet to rest?

In his research and teaching, Avishek Ganguly focuses on the various intersections between contemporary drama, literature and performance, and questions of translation and multilingualism, the formation of collectivities, and everyday life and urban space. He has also published articles on contemporary urban musical cultures in India and has a range of ongoing projects in South Asia-based comparative cultural studies (including popular cinema). He is currently a Research Fellow at the International Research Center, Freie Universitat in Berlin, and in 2015 he was awarded RISD’s first Global Faculty Fellowship. Ganguly’s works in progress include a book project that looks at how multilingualism and translation gets figured across a range of contemporary dramatic and performance texts.

on sabbatical academic year 2022/23

Jung Joon Lee is an art historian specializing in the history and theory of photography. Her research and teaching interests span the intersections of art and politics, transoceanic intimacies and decoloniality, and gender and sexuality.

Lee’s forthcoming book, Shooting for Change: Korean Photography after the War (Duke University Press) examines the onto-epistemic issues of “national” photography through the ways that photography in Korea and its diaspora presents an everyday haunted by 20th-century war and militarism and their ongoing pervasiveness.

Lee is currently working on a monograph project exploring artists’ transoceanic collaborations with a focus on exhibitions as sites that generate affective rupture to the official history, memory and kinship of East Asia. She is a 2022–23 Society Fellow at Cornell University’s Society for the Humanities and was a visiting scholar at the Graduate School of Communication and Arts, Yonsei University, in Spring 2022.

*on sabbatical academic year 2024–25

Ijlal Muzaffar teaches and pursues research on humanitarian design and the history and theory of modern architecture. His work has appeared widely in edited volumes, biennale catalogues and peer-reviewed journals. He is a founding member of the architectural history research collaborative and publishing platform Aggregate. His first book, The Periphery Within: Modern Architecture and the Making of the Third World, slated to come out later this year from the University of Texas Press, looks at how modern architects and planners played a critical role in shaping the discourse on Third World development and its associated structures of power after World War II.

Muzaffar’s second book project is titled Settling Dreams. It charts the formation of a "cotton belt" in the Sindh desert in southwest India (now in Pakistan) by the British colonial government in 1898 when the supply of US cotton to the British mills was disrupted by the American Civil War. Introductory chapters of this book have already appeared in edited volumes. Muzaffar also coedited Architecture in Development: Systems and the Emergence of the Global South (Routledge, 2022).

Sean Nesselrode Moncada (he/him) is a historian of Latin American and Latinx art, architecture and visual culture. In his research he focuses on visual and material modernisms, their uneven implementation across the hemisphere and their contested social and ecological dimensions. In his courses, he invites students to consider how images proliferate and behave in the world, encouraging an expanded view of what constitutes artistic production and who merits inclusion in our received histories.

Nesselrode Moncada is the author of Refined Material: Petroculture and Modernity (University of California Press, 2023), which examines the material, spatial and theoretical development of Venezuelan modernisms through the lens of petroleum extraction and refinement. He has published on such subjects as the relationship between art and design in the work of Gego, the politics of midcentury geometric abstraction in South America and the visual legacies of settler colonialism in contemporary art. His writings and reviews appear in journals including Architectural Theory Review, Caiana: Revista de Historia del Arte y Cultura Visual del Centro Argentino de Investigadores de Arte, Hemisphere: Visual Cultures of the Americas and Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture.

Naimah Zulmadelle Pétigny is a Black feminist scholar, dancer and educator. She holds the Schiller Family Assistant Professorship in Race in Art and Design at RISD.

Pétigny’s research and teaching is shaped by her experiences as a youth organizer, racial justice facilitator, and dancer in professional ensembles. Her research and writing is multimodal and exists at the intersections of Black feminist theory, gender studies and performance studies. Pétigny writes from, and towards, expansive and experimental sites of Blackness to rethink the linkages between coloniality, performance, erotics and Black liberation.

Pétigny’s work has been published in Commoning Ethnography, The Walker Art Center Magazine, Agitate! Unsettling Knowledges Journal and the Routledge International Handbook of Gender and Feminist Geographies. Pétigny’s collaborations with Black dance companies, art centers and networks of social-justice educators demonstrate a commitment to building dynamic spaces of connection and creative research. Within her classrooms, Pétigny supports students’ holistic growth as analytical thinkers, creative writers and changemakers.

Christopher Roberts examines Black spaces/places/sites/scenes of memory and forgetting. He engages in this work with an emphasis on port cities in the United States that anchored the transatlantic and domestic slave trades. His research traipses the contours of sculpture, architecture, history, photography, graphic design, museum studies, fine arts and art history.

By way of criticism and scholarly analysis framed through a Black Studies lens, Roberts strives to unravel the entanglements of race and coloniality that suture our conceptions of monuments, maps, archives and museums as concrete representations of the past in order to break the hold they have on our public and private spatial imaginations.

Andrew Robarts teaches courses on Islam and the Islamic World, Istanbul and the Ottoman Empire, and Russia, focusing on questions of identity in the imperial context, migration and mobility, regionalism, and international relations.

Robarts' first book investigated migration and the spread of epidemic diseases in the maritime space of the Black Sea region. This analysis was undertaken within the context of Ottoman/Turkish-Russian relations in the modern period. His current manuscript project will, from a world historical perspective, survey Russian influence in, interaction with and impact on the Middle East across the early modern and modern periods.

Mark Sherman’s main interest is in late-medieval and early modern European literature, particularly the Anglo-Italian connection through narrative poetry. His recent research focuses on political theology, speculative cosmologies, the mythologies of place and poetic historiography, and his primary theoretical interests concern the work of Giorgio Agamben, Hans Blumenberg and Walter Benjamin.

Sherman has published critical essays on Geoffrey Chaucer, Edmund Spenser, Dante Alighieri and Mikhail Bakhtin, and he has undertaken collaborative teaching with colleagues in the Illustration and Landscape Architecture departments and the Experimental and Foundation Studies division. Among his recent courses are Epic, Losing Paradise/Inventing the World, Art, Magic and Science in the Renaissance, and Radical Theater: Bertolt Brecht and Dario Fo.

Foad Torshizi is an assistant professor of art of the Islamic world. His research interests are in the areas of global contemporary art, contemporary Iranian and Middle Eastern art, postcolonial theory, ethics of readership, theories of globalization and cosmopolitanism, comparative literature and politics of translation and interpretation. His research has appeared in academic journals both in the US and Iran. In May 2021 his article on the works of Iranian artist Ghazaleh Hedayat and feminism in contemporary Iranian art was published in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (Duke University Press).

Torshizi is currently working on a manuscript project that examines the ways in which western disciplinary forms, and more specifically art criticism, return home to circumscribe aesthetic diversity in Iran, demanding that the aesthetic economies of Iranian artifacts align with Euro-American understandings of meaning, value, aspiration and desire.