Roberto C. Ferrari, Ph.D., has joined Avery Library as its new Curator of Art Properties.  Roberto brings experience and knowledge as an art historian and librarian that will help reshape the department of Art Properties for the future.  His most recent librarian position was in the Image Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he oversaw digitization projects and worked with analog and digital image collections. He has taught classes on Asian art and nineteenth-century European art at Drew University, Marymount Manhattan College, and City College of New York.

Roberto received his Ph.D. in Art History from the CUNY Graduate Center in May 2013.  His dissertation, “Beyond Polychromy: John Gibson, the Roman School of Sculpture, and the Modern Classical Body,” is the first monographic study of the work of this nineteenth-century British sculptor.  His M.Phil. degree (CUNY, 2010) focused on European and American art from 1750 to 1900. He holds an M.L.S. (1997) and an M.A. in Humanities (1994) both from University of South Florida.  He has received a number of scholarly awards, including a Yale Center for British Art Visiting Scholar Award, a research fellowship from the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, England, and the Spero-Goldreich Dissertation Fellowship. 

Roberto is a specialist on the artist Simeon Solomon (1840-1905) and is the creator and co-coordinator of the online Simeon Solomon Research Archive. He is the author of two forthcoming essays on Gibson for edited book collections to be published by Ashgate in 2013 and 2014.  Among his recent publications are: an exhibition review of Grayson Perry: The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman in the Historians of British Art Newsletter; “Shooting in Series: An Interview with Photographer Gerald Mocarsky” in The Gay & Lesbian Review; and “Pre-Raphaelite Patronage: Simeon Solomon’s Letters to James Leathart and Frederick Leyland” in the exhibition catalogue Love Revealed: Simeon Solomon and the Pre-Raphaelites (London: Merrell, 2005)

–by Carole Ann Fabian, Director, Avery Library