Shawon Kinew is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University and a Shutzer Assistant Professor at the Radcliffe Institute.

Kinew is an art historian of early modern Southern Europe with a specialization in the art and theory of the Roman Baroque. Currently completing a book manuscript on Melchiorre Cafà’s “soft sculptures” in hard stone, Kinew takes great pleasure in teaching subjects as varied as the poetics of painting in the Cinquecento, the role of indigenous North American art in building and imagining reconciliation, and the global Baroque.

Kinew has held residential fellowships at the Getty Research Institute and at the Bibliotheca Hertziana, Max Planck Institute for Art History in Rome, Italy, where she was a Samuel H. Kress Foundation Institutional Fellow. Her scholarship has been supported by numerous organizations including the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Fondazione Lemmermann in Rome, and the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard.

Raised in Winnipeg and on Lake of the Woods in Canada, Kinew received her Hon. BA from the University of Toronto and her A.M. and PhD from Harvard University. Before her appointment at Harvard, Kinew was a postdoctoral fellow in the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship for Scholars in the Humanities and a lecturer in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University.