Dr Emily Floyd

Emily C. Floyd is Associate Professor of Visual Culture and Art before 1700 at University College London and Editor and Curator at the Center for the Study of Material and Visual Culture of Religion at Yale University (MAVCOR – mavcor.yale.edu). She joined the department in 2018 having completed her BA from Smith College in History of Art and Religious Studies, her MAR in Religion and the Arts at the Institute of Sacred Music at Yale University, and her PhD in Art History and Latin American Studies at Tulane University, graduating in 2018. 

Her first book, The Mobile Image: Prints and the Shaping of Devotional Networks from Lima to the Andes and Beyond (University of Texas Press, 2025), is a study of the production and movement of prints in colonial South America. Her current research focuses on how race was represented and understood in the colonial period in South America and how art historians focusing on colonial South America have conceptualized race in their writing. 

Visit Emily's RPS Profile for the most up to date information.

Research

Emily’s current research project, ‘The Monster and the Saint: Race and the Body in the Art and Art History of the Colonial Andes’, supported by the Leverhulme Trust and Thoma Foundation, centres on normative whiteness, implicit depictions of race, and intersecting ideas of sanctity, monstrosity, and the body in colonial South America and in art historical writing on colonial South American art. She has published extensively in English and Spanish on such topics as printmaking in colonial Lima, the digital humanities, Inca metalwork, and race and the visual in colonial South America.

Emily’s first book, The Mobile Image: Prints and the Shaping of Devotional Networks from Lima to the Andes and Beyond (University of Texas Press, 2025), is a study of the production and movement of prints in colonial South America. 

Specialisms
Pre-contact and colonial art of Latin America; print culture; race and representation

Selected Publications

• The Mobile Image: Prints and the Shaping of Devotional Networks from Lima to the Andes and Beyond (University of Texas Press, 2025)
• "Luz y oscuridad: la imprenta y el negro como color, experiencia, y raza en el virreinato del Perú,” Bulletin of Spanish Studies (2025)
• "The Brush and the Burin: Copies, Originals, and True Portraits in Juan María de Guevara y Cantos’ Corona de la divinissima María (Lima, 1644)” in Collective Creativity and Artistic Agency in Colonial Latin America (2023)
• With Suzanne Stratton-Pruitt, "Juan Francisco Rosa: Engraver to the Elite in Eighteenth-Century Lima” Print Quarterly (2023)
• "The word as object in colonial Spanish South America: Juan María de Guevara y Cantos’s corona de la divinissima María (Lima, 1644),” Material Religion (2021) 

Teaching and Supervision

Emily teaches on pre-contact and Spanish colonial art and visual culture; on the legacies of colonialism in modern and contemporary Latin American art and culture; and on print culture. 

Inquiries are welcome from potential doctoral students. Potential projects should ideally have a clear connection to Emily's areas of expertise, whether regionally, temporally, or thematically. 

Current PhD Students:

Manuela Portales Sanfuentes: ‘Thinking the Ornament: Collecting, Classifying and Displaying Decorative Arts in Latin American Museums’

Daen Palma Huse: ‘Transient Visuals: Hand-Held Ephemera in Nineteenth-Century Peru’

Contact

Office: G04, 21 Gordon Square
Office Hours: On research leave, 2025/26
Email: e.floyd@ucl.ac.uk