Last year, Art History associate professor Paul Niell was appointed a Samuel H. Kress Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Established in 1979 with the opening of I.M. Pei’s East Building, the Center has become a leading site for art historical research. Fellows present their work publicly during their term, and in October 2024 Dr. Niell delivered his lecture, “The Bohío and the City: Ephemeral Architecture and Urbanism in the Spanish Caribbean,” in the NGA’s West Lecture Hall.
As a Kress Senior Fellow, Dr. Niell advanced his current book project on ephemeral architecture and agency in the Caribbean from the early modern period through the nineteenth century. His research drew on the NGA library’s rare books, prints, and photographs, as well as the vast holdings of the Library of Congress, the U.S. National Archives, Smithsonian collections, the Folger Shakespeare Library, Dumbarton Oaks, and several museums.
Niell’s recent scholarship includes the essay “Following the Footsteps of Juana Agripina: Slavery, Memory, and the Architecture of Invisibility in Ponce, Puerto Rico,” published in Architectures of Slavery: Ruins and Reconstructions (University of Virginia Press, 2025), co-edited by Nathaniel Robert Walker and Rachel Ama Asaa Engmann. His chapter examines the court testimony of Juana Agripina, an enslaved woman in Puerto Rico who accused her enslaver of freeing and then illegally re-enslaving her. Niell considers the insights her account provides into the role of architecture in sustaining slavery and the myriad ways in which enslaved people negotiated the built environment, traversing what was for them an incredibly fraught landscape. The volume inaugurates UVA Press’s new series, Race, Place, and Justice.
In addition, Dr. Niell is co-editing a forthcoming volume stemming from The Forgotten Canopy conference and workshop series held at UCLA’s William Andrews Clark Memorial Library in 2022–23. His service to the field also continues to grow. He has been appointed Book Review Editor for the Americas for the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians for a three-year term.
