Welcome Dr. Brendan Weaver!

We are excited to introduce Dr. Brendan Weaver, who joins the FSU Department of Art History this fall as Visiting Assistant Professor. Dr. Weaver is an historical archaeologist focusing on material culture and the built environment, including visual arts and architecture, among indigenous and African-descended peoples of Latin America. His current research is focused on power, aesthetics, and memory among enslaved Afro-Andeans in Spanish colonial and early republican Peru.

I’m absolutely delighted to be joining this dynamic department, with a dedicated faculty doing a range of remarkable work focused on material and visual cultures and such creative and curious students with diverse interests.

Weaver looks forward to building the range of courses available in the Visual Cultures of the Americas program, especially with an eye to Andean South America and African descended cultures. He draws on his theoretical expertise in material aesthetics, power, and memory for his Spring Semester graduate seminar “Archaeologies of Memory, Art, and Architecture.” In the coming year he will also deploy instruction in digital methods aimed at enriching the MCHS program.

Prior to coming to FSU, Dr, Weaver was a Lecturer of African Diaspora Archaeology at the University of North Carolina Wilmington (2022-23), Postdoctoral Fellow at the Stanford Archaeology Center (California, 2018-2022), the Mellon Institute Visiting Assistant Professor of History and Anthropology at Berea College (Kentucky, 2016-2018), and a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Collaborative Research in the Humanities, Queen’s University Belfast (Northern Ireland, 2015-2016).

Since 2009, Weaver has directed the Haciendas of Nasca Archaeological Project (PAHN), centered on Nasca’s Ingenio Valley, the first project to archaeologically study the African diaspora in what is today the Republic of Peru. The interdisciplinary project explores the material culture, political aesthetics, and quotidian experience of enslaved African-descended laborers at two 17th- and 18th-century wine estates formerly owned by the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) on Peru’s South Coast. His forthcoming monograph, Fruit of the Vine, Work of Human Hands: An Archaeology of Slavery and Aesthetics at the Jesuit Vineyards of Nasca, Peru, results from this research and asks two central questions: 1) What were the material conditions for the production of enslaved subjectivities on these estates? and 2) as a result of this material experience, how did enslaved actors produce and engage in meaning making? Both of these questions are advanced through innovative aesthetic and semiotic approaches to power and enslaved praxis.

The 18th-century Jesuit chapel of the Hacienda San Joseph de la Nasca