Dr. George Flaherty is Associate Professor of Art History and Co-Director of the Center for Latin American Visual Studies (CLAVIS). His research and teaching focus primarily on modern and contemporary visual and spatial cultures in Mexico, the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, and their diasporas in the United States. His scholarly interests extend to film and media studies, postcolonial and subaltern studies, and Afro-Latin American and Afro-Latinx studies.
Dr. Flaherty is at work on a book manuscript, titled Cross-Border Renaissances: Race and Revolutionary Art between Mexico and Black America. The book examines the axis of cultural exchange, affinity, and appropriation between Mexican and Black artists and intellectuals of the 1920s and 30s to expand the borders of the Mexican Renaissance and Harlem Renaissance.
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, 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. His article in JSAH was recognized with the SAH Founders’ Award in 2015. He has also contributed to several anthologies and exhibitions catalogs, including Félix Candela from Mexico City to Chicago: Rise and Fall of Experimentation in Concrete (2024), 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).