Campus Directory

Pronouns she, ella

Division Arts Division

Department/College/Unit History of Art/Visual Culture

Title Distinguished Professor

Affiliation Faculty

Other UCSC Campus Affiliation Latin American & Latino Studies
Anthropology Department
Dolores Huerta Research Center for the Americas

Faculty Type Regular Faculty

Areas of Expertise Archaeology
Art Theory
Epistemology
Cultural Studies
History of Art and Visual Culture
Indigenous Arts
Latin American and Latino Studies
Visual Arts
Visual Culture

Primary Office Location Porter College Academic
213

Office Hours for Students/ Office Hours By appointment

Mail Stop Porter Faculty Services

Biography, Education and Training

Summary of Expertise

Cultural histories of the native Americas and colonial Latin America. Inka (Inca) visual and performance culture before and after Spanish colonization, 1400–1825 CE.

Research Interests

Carolyn Dean is interested in how the arts embed various, often-conflicting ontologies and how indigenous perspectives have been ignored, dismissed, and misconstrued from colonial times through the present. She has published numerous articles and two books: Inka Bodies and the Body of Christ (Duke University Press, 1999) and A Culture of Stone (Duke University Press, 2010); her third book, Absence of Images: Inside Inka Abstraction, is currently in press.