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Arianna Ray

Arianna Ray is a doctoral candidate concentrating in early modern Northern European art and its Atlantic connections. She specializes in the study of prints and their materiality, global circulation, and impact in the construction of race and alterity. She is also interested in how prints functioned as objects of Protestant religious devotion, conversion, and expression during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Ray's dissertation, entitled "Paper Skin: Printing Blackness and Materializing Race in the Early Modern Dutch Atlantic,” investigates the depiction of Africans and African diasporic peoples in prints produced of the Netherlands, West Africa, Brazil, and Suriname in order to analyze the role of art, materiality, and medicine in the epidermalization of race. Prior to coming to Northwestern, she earned her BA in Art History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and her MA in Art History from the University of Texas at Austin. Outside of the academic world, she has held positions in a variety of museums, including the Art Institute of Chicago, Blanton Museum of Art, Orlando Museum of Art, Ackland Art Museum, and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.