Allison Caplan
Allison Caplan 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 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 at work on her first book, Flickering Creations: Concepts of Nahua Precious Art, which reconstructs Nahua theorizations of color, light, surface, and assemblage for art in 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 in 2021. Caplan’s scholarship has also appeared in Ethnohistory, West 86th, and MAVCOR Journal, as well as the exhibition catalogue Golden Kingdoms: Luxury Arts in the Ancient Americas and the Routledge Companion to the Global Renaissance. She also has essays in the forthcoming volumes, Mexico Tenochtitlan: Dynamism at the Center of the World (Dumbarton Oaks) and Exhibiting Animals in Europe and America (Routledge).
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). She has also published translations and presented her research in Nahuatl as part of the Field School in Documentation, Participatory Research, Teaching, and Revitalization of Endangered Languages in Xaltipan, Tlaxcala, Mexico (2017).
Caplan’s research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Interdisciplinary Humanities Center at UC-Santa Barbara, 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. She has also worked in curatorial and education departments at several museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, American Numismatic Society, Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, and Getty Research Institute.
Caplan teaches courses on ancient and colonial Mesoamerica, Indigenous materiality and art theory, and museums and collecting. She is currently accepting graduate students in the areas of ancient and colonial Latin American art and is particularly excited to advise those interest in working at the intersection of art history and the study of Indigenous languages.