Department of Art History names Penn State Sawyer Seminar postdoctoral fellow

Historian Beatriz Véliz Argueta has been named the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow for the ongoing Penn State Sawyer Seminar, “Transmission, Containment, Transformation: A Comparative Approach to Architecture and Contagion in Early Modern Cities.” Jointly sponsored by the College of Arts and Architecture and the College of the Liberal Arts, the Sawyer Seminar is bringing more than a dozen visiting scholars to Penn State to give public lectures, participate in colloquia with graduate students and to conduct digital humanities workshops. A schedule of public lectures can be found on the seminar’s website. Véliz Argueta’s area of expertise is colonial and postcolonial urbanism and the construction of place. She completed her Ph.D. at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin in 2020 and is currently revising her dissertation on the complex interplay of race and space in shaping the everyday urban experience for publication as a book, tentatively titled “Entangled Urban Narratives.” Véliz Argueta incorporates photographic practice into her research and scholarship, and she co-founded the international Urban Photography Summer School at Goldsmiths, University of London. During her postdoctoral fellowship within the Department of Art History, Véliz Argueta will participate in Sawyer Seminar events, work with students and continue to conduct research on the history of indigenous strategies for negotiating and resisting colonization.