Thomas Cummins

Thomas Cummins is The Dumbarton Oaks Professor of the History of Pre-Columbian and Colonial Art at Harvard University. His research and teaching focuses on Pre-Columbian and Latin American Colonial Art. Recent research interests include the analysis of early Ecuadorian ceramic figurines and the study of late Pre-Columbian systems of knowledge and representation, especially Inka, and their impact on the formation of 16th and 17th century colonial artistic and social forms. He has also published essays on New World town planning, the early images of the Inca, miraculous images in Colombia, and on the relationship between visual and alphabetic literacy in the conversion of Indians. Among other essays on colonial Afro-Latin American art, he is the author of the chapter titled “Image of the Black in Colonial Latin America art,” which will be included in the volumes The Image of the Black in Latin American and Caribbean Art to be published by Harvard University Press in 2020. He is the author of Beyond the Lettered City: Indigenous Literacies in The Andes (co-authored with Joanne Rappaport, Durham: The Duke University Press, 2012) and of Toasts with the Inca: Andean Abstraction and Colonial Images on Kero Vessels (An Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002). He is also the editor of several volumes, including Manuscript Cultures of Colonial Mexico and Peru: New Questions and Approaches. (coedited with Emily Engel, Barbara Anderson, and Juan Ossio, Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2014); The Inka Empire Revealed: A Century after the Machu Picchu Discovery (coedited with Yoshio Masuda, Izumi Shimada, Ken-chi Shinoda Tetsuya Amino, and Ono Mashisro, Tokyo Broad Casting System Television, Inc.; in Japanese 2012); and The Getty Murúa: Essays on the making of Martín de Murúa’s “Historia General del Piru” J. Paul Getty Museum Ms. XIII 16 (coedited with Barbara Anderson, Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2008).