Alba Campo Rosillo
Art Historian and Museum Professional
Teaching, researching and writing about art are my passion. This is why I have devoted myself to pursuing graduate studies, specializing in U.S. American and Spanish Viceregal art. My doctoral dissertation “Artistry and Industry: The Portraiture of George Peter Alexander Healy (1843-1871)” explores portraiture of American artist George Peter Alexander Healy (1913-1894) through the lens of industry, which functioned in Healys career as a source of patronage as well as inspiration, sparking the artist to redefine a genre and rethink marketability. In the summer of 2021 I defended my dissertation and doctorated in art history at the University of Delaware (UD). I studied nineteenth-century European and American art and graduated cum laude with the thesis “American Art at the New York World Exhibition of 1853,” at the University of Amsterdam.
I have enjoyed teaching at several universities, where I have been awarded by students and peers. As a guest-lecturer I have presented at graduate seminars and undergraduate courses at UD (2018-19); and at the undergraduate level at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC, 2015), and at Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona (2008). I have lectured as a teaching assistant for survey courses on Western Art History, Photography and East Asian Art History at Schiller University, Madrid (2023), Saint Louis University, Madrid (2022), UD (2016-18), and UIUC (2014). My enthusiasm for teaching has been recognized by the faculty in Art History at UD, who has awarded me the Anna R. and Robert T. Silver Teaching Award (2019), and by my students at UIUC who ranked me as an excellent teacher (2014).
To engage the academic community and art lover with my ideas, I have published essays on nineteenth-century and contemporary portraiture, and blogposts on artists’ self-portraits and on royal portraiture. In addition to this, I have reviewed Mary Elizabeth Boone’s “The Spanish Element in Our Nationality:” Spain and America at the World's Fairs and Centennial Celebrations, 1876-1915 (forthcoming), and Rachel Stephens’ Selling Andrew Jackson. Ralph E. W. Earl and the Politics of Portraiture, and I have assessed multiple museum exhibitions for Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide.
To learn more about my lectures, publications and fellowships see my CV, and social media profiles:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/arthistory
https://udel.academia.edu/AlbaCampoRosillo
George Peter Alexander Healy’s portrait of industrial inventor Charles Goodyear, 1855. Oil on a sheet of rubber. Mattatuck Museum of Art, Connecticut.