Allison Caplan is an assistant professor in the Department of the History of Art. She is a scholar of the art of Late Postclassic and early colonial Mesoamerica, with a special focus on the Nahuas (Aztecs) of central Mexico. Her research interests include Indigenous Nahua art theory and aesthetics, issues of materiality and value, animal-human relations, and the relationship between visual expression and the Nahuatl language. Caplan is currently completing her first book, Flickering Creations: Concepts of Nahua Precious Art, which reconstructs Nahua theorizations of color, light, surface, and assemblage for art combining precious stones, feathers, and metals, referred to in Nahuatl as tlazohtli (“precious, or beloved things”). The project emerges from her dissertation, which won the Best Dissertation Award from the Association for Latin American Art. Caplan’s work has also appeared in Ethnohistory, West 86th, MAVCOR Journal, Golden Kingdoms: Luxury Arts in the Ancient Americas (Getty), and the edited volumes The Routledge Companion to the Global Renaissance, Exhibiting Animals in Europe and America (Routledge), and Mexico Tenochtitlan: Dynamism at the Center of the World (Dumbarton Oaks).
Caplan has studied the Nahuatl language for ten years, including through two FLAS summer fellowships with the Instituto de Docencia e Investigaciones Etnológicas de Zacatecas (IDIEZ). Her research has also been supported by grants and fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, Getty Research Institute, and Metropolitan Museum of Art. Prior to joining the faculty at Yale, Caplan was Assistant Professor in the History of Art and Architecture at the University of California, Santa Barbara and the inaugural Austen-Stokes Ancient Americas Postdoctoral Fellow at Johns Hopkins University. Caplan received her Ph.D. and M.A. in Art History and Latin American Studies from Tulane University and her B.A. in Comparative Literature and Society from Columbia University.