Adam Herring

Adam Herring is a specialist in the art of the pre-Columbian Americas. He was trained at Princeton University, the University of California at Berkeley and at Yale University, where his dissertation in art history received the Frances Blanshard Fellowship Award in 1999. His research interests include visual theory and semiotics, anthropological and materialist critique of visual experience, and the history of the discipline.

Herring has received fellowships from Dumbarton Oaks, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and The Huntington Library. His articles have appeared in RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, The Art Bulletin, Critical Inquiry, The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, and Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas. His study of ancient Maya calligraphy, Art and Writing in the Maya Cities, AD 600-800: A Poetics of Line, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2005. His second book, Art and Vision in the Inca Empire: Andeans and Europeans at Cajamarca (Cambridge 2015) received honorable mention in the 2016 American Publisher’s Award for Scholarly Excellence, Art History and Criticism Category. The book was also a finalist for CAA’s 2016 Charles Rufus Morey Book Award.

Herring was named a 2017 Guggenheim Fellow in support of his research on Pre-Columbian art. Titled “Eyes in a Landscape,” his current project considers the Inca empire’s troubled environmental politics, and the particular forms of aesthetic agency those struggles helped produce.