Associate Professor
Art History
Latin American and Latinx Art
Department Assistant Chair for Art History
Director, Center for Latin American Visual Studies (CLAVIS)
Dr. George Flaherty is Associate Professor of Art History and Director of the Center for Latin American Visual Studies (CLAVIS). His research and teaching focus primarily on modern and contemporary art and architecture as well as film and video, centered in Mexico, the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, and their diasporas in the United States. His scholarly interests extend to Afro-Latin American/Latinx studies and postcolonial/subaltern studies.
Dr. Flaherty is currently conducting primary research for A Traffic in Blackness: Race and Revolutionary Art between Mexico and the United States, 1910–1940 (working title). This book project examines the axis of cultural exchange, affinity, and appropriation between the “Mexican Renaissance” and “Black Renaissance” of the 1920s and 30s.
His first book, Hotel Mexico: Dwelling on the ’68 Movement (University of California Press, 2016), investigated the spatial dimensions of the 1968 student-led democratization movement in Mexico City and its afterlives. This project received support from the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (National Gallery of Art, Washington), Social Science Research Council, Society of Architectural Historians (SAH), and a Fulbright-García Robles grant to Mexico City, where he was a visiting scholar at the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Hotel Mexico was recognized with the Arvey Book Award from the Association of Latin American Art (ALAA) in 2017.
Dr. Flaherty’s scholarship has appeared in various journals, including Social Text, Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, and Art in Translation. He has also contributed to several anthologies and exhibitions catalogs, including La Raza (2020), The Routledge Companion to Critical Approaches to Contemporary Architecture (2019), Mexico Modern: Art, Commerce, and Cultural Exchange (2017), Genealogías del arte contemporáneo en México, 1952–1967 (2015), and Defying Stability: Artistic Processes in Mexico, 1952–1967 (2014). La Raza was recognized with ALAA’s Thoma Foundation Exhibition Catalog Award in 2021.
He is a graduate of Swarthmore College and the University of California at Santa Barbara (Ph.D. 2011).