Amelia Goerlitz is Chair of Academic Programs for the Research and Scholars Center (RSC) at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM), where she organizes convenings that advance scholarship in American art and directs the museum’s residential fellowship program (est. 1970) for pre- and postdoctoral scholars, artists, and conservators. From 2019 to 2023, she was acting co-head of the RSC, serving on the museum’s senior leadership team and providing scholarly direction to a $10 million, fiftieth-anniversary fellowship campaign. In her time at SAAM, Goerlitz has organized hundreds of lectures and eight international symposia on art of the United States, as well as the monthly lunchtime program, Art Bites, which facilitates close looking and conversation about individual artworks in the museum’s collection. She has published essays in American Art (2017; 2020) and Blanton Museum of Art: Latin American Collection (2006); co-edited and contributed to East–West Interchanges in American Art: A Long and Tumultuous Relationship (2012); and edited Tomás Rivas: Left to My Own Devices (2007).

Deborah L. Krohn teaches early modern cultural history and museum studies at Bard Graduate Center in New York City, where she is professor and chair of academic programs. She holds a BA and MA from Princeton University, and a PhD from Harvard University. She has published widely on Renaissance art and material culture, as well as on culinary history. Publications include Staging the Table in Europe 1500–1800 (book and exhibition at BGC, 2023); Food and Knowledge in Renaissance Italy: Bartolomeo Scappi’s Paper Kitchens (2015); “Verbal Representations of Furniture” in A Cultural History of Furniture: The Age of Exploration, 1500-1700 (2022); “Carving and Folding by the Book in Early Modern Europe,” Journal of Early Modern History (2020); “Reading, Writing and Cooking,” in Text, Food and the Early Modern Reader: Eating Words (2019). As a curator, she has collaborated on exhibitions including Salvaging the Past: French Decorative Arts from the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2013, BGC), Dutch New York between East and West: The World of Margrieta van Varick (2009, BGC), and Art and Love in Renaissance Italy (2008-2009, Metropolitan Museum of Art).

Jemma Field is Associate Director of Research at the Yale Center for British Art (YCBA), where she is responsible for advancing exhibition and program development, cultivating a vibrant research community, spearheading research endeavors related to the YCBA collection, and fostering collaboration with scholars at Yale and worldwide. She oversees the museum’s Visiting Scholar’s Program and directs the New Haven side of the Yale-in-London program, the university’s oldest credit-granting study abroad program for Yale undergraduate students, in collaboration with the Paul Mellon Centre in London. Jemma is a Contributing Editor for the peer-reviewed online journal British Art Studies, which the museum co-publishes with the Paul Mellon Centre in London, and she is an Editor for the book series Early Modern Court Studies published by Amsterdam University Press. A specialist in early modern court culture, her research focusses on historic identity formation and the political significance of culture, and her first monograph, Anna of Denmark: The Material and Visual Culture of the Stuart Courts, 1589-1619, was published by Manchester University Press in 2020. She is currently working on an edited volume, with colleagues at the YCBA, on portraiture and self-fashioning in Tudor England.

Nan Wolverton is Vice President for Academic and Public Programs at the American Antiquarian Society, a national research library of pre-1900 printed and manuscript sources in what is now the United States. She manages and oversees all aspects of the Society’s programming, including serving as director of the fellowship program. A signature program at the AAS is the Center for Historic American Visual Culture (CHAViC), which offers seminars on visual culture each summer. Wolverton has taught at Smith College and Amherst College and has served as a material culture and humanities consultant for numerous institutions, including the Emily Dickinson Museum, Herman Melville’s Arrowhead, the Nichols House Museum, Historic Deerfield, Inc., and the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center. She has lectured and published widely on material and visual culture topics, including most recently on the material culture of Indigenous basket makers and sellers at Nonotuck in The Oxford Handbook of Emily Dickinson.

Nancy Um is Associate Director for Research and Knowledge Creation at the Getty Research Institute. In this role, she oversees the research agendas of the GRI, including its international scholars’ program and digital initiatives. Her research explores the Islamic world from the perspective of the coast, with a focus on material, visual, and built culture on the Arabian Peninsula and around the rims of the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. She is the author of The Merchant Houses of Mocha: Trade and Architecture in an Indian Ocean Port (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009) and Shipped but not Sold: Material Culture and the Social Protocols of Trade during Yemen’s Age of Coffee (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2017), in addition to studies about trade, art, diplomacy, and gift exchange around the early modern Indian Ocean rim. From 2019 to 2022, she served as Associate Dean for Faculty Development and Inclusion at Harpur College at Binghamton University, where she established faculty mentoring and advancement programs, developed equitable hiring and retention initiatives, and spearheaded a new interdisciplinary minor in Digital and Data Studies.

Luis Vargas-Santiago, PhD is a tenured researcher at the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas (IIE) of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). He works primarily on Latin American and Latinx art, with an emphasis on political commemoration, image migration, social movements, and queer studies. His most recent book, Las otras vidas de Zapata: Un ícono revolucionario en México y los Estados Unidos (Mexico: IIE-UNAM/Trilce, 2025) examines the multifaceted legacy of Emiliano Zapata as a revolutionary icon in the US-Mexico binational space. His other books include the anthology Antonio Ruiz El Corcito. Montajes y escenas del México Moderno (México: Museo Amparo/IIE-UNAM, 2024) and Museums: Trends and Digital Strategy (Washington, DC: Inter-American Development Bank, 2022). His work has been supported by the Getty Foundation, the Clark Institute, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Fulbright-García Robles Program, among others. He has also held positions at UNAM including Deputy Director of Public Programs at the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC) and Chief Curator of M68, the 1968 Student Movement Memorial. He has curated numerous exhibitions, including Emiliano. Zapata después Zapata at the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City, and Imágenes del Mexicano, co-curated with Dafne Cruz at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels.

Erica Wall is a creative and collaborative educator, curator, and arts leader with extensive community-building experience. Wall is the current Director of the Lunder Institute for American Art at Colby College in Maine. As the Director of an institute dedicated to American art, she oversees a nationally recognized fellowship program, consisting of an artist-in-residency and a remote visiting-artist program. As part of this research initiative, dedicated to reshaping the contours of American art, Wall established an annual, large scale 10-week summer think tank, an audio archive database of conversations between Lunder fellows across disciplines, and a national museum partnership program that responds to the question, What is the state of American art? Erica Wall has done extensive work within art institutions, the commercial art world, and academia. Before joining the Lunder Institute, she served as Executive Director of MCLA Arts and Culture at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, founded a combined gallery and artist residency for emerging artists, and held related positions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the J. Paul Getty Center, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento.