Dr. Jamie Forde

Biography

Jamie Forde is a Lecturer in Pre-Modern Art and the Programme Director for Global Premodern Art at Edinburgh College of Art. Forde specializes in visual culture and architecture of pre-Hispanic and colonial Latin America, with a geographic focus on central and southern Mexico. An anthropological archaeologist, Forde uses art historical and archaeological methods to study the Indigenous Mexican societies during the periods surrounding the colonial encounters with Europeans. The research and teaching adopt a global perspective, emphasizing the entanglements of Indigenous peoples of the Americas within the dynamics of early modern globalization and the transcultural exchanges of materials, ideas, images, and organisms that followed the crossings of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Forde's ongoing interdisciplinary community-based field project is located in Achiutla, a site in the Mixtec highlands of Oaxaca, Mexico. He is currently finishing a book manuscript based on this work, supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation and National Geographic. Forde has held long-term fellowships at prestigious institutions including Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, the John Carter Brown Library, and the Newberry Library in Chicago. He completed his BA in Anthropology from the University of California Santa Cruz and both his MA and PhD in Anthropology from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Before joining Edinburgh, he was part of the curatorial team responsible for the reinstallation of the permanent Mexico and Central America gallery at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

Research Interests

Experience