Samuel Frédéric Luterbacher specializes in Early Modern (1500-1800) art, craft, and material culture in a global context and teaches courses on premodern art histories of the wider Mediterranean world.
Luterbacher’s research focuses on the arts of the early modern Portuguese and Spanish Empires, particularly Iberian expansion in Asia and its connections to Colonial Latin America. His current book project, provisionally entitled Layovers: Export Art and Iberian Asia, investigates the craft, transport, and reuse of East Asian export lacquerware made for export across Spanish and Portuguese empires between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. It accounts for instances of assemblage, additive ornamentation, appropriation, repair, and erasure across broad periods and geographic zones during an era of Iberian expansionism and colonization within the Indian and Pacific oceans.
Luterbacher’s research and teaching often focus on the relationship between art and empire before 1800, considering the making and movement of objects across cultures, places, and periods conditioned by systems of trade and colonization. This reflects a broader interest in artisanal knowledge, labor, and materials, the rethinking of traditional divides between “fine” arts and “craft,” folk traditions and folk art, the politics of display of the past in modern-day museums, and its intersections with issues of gender, race, and class.
Luterbacher’s work has been supported by the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts in Washington D.C and he has been a member of The Global Horizons in Pre- modern Art research group at the University of Bern’s Institute of Art History. His essays have been published in journals and edited volumes, including the Journal of Early Modern History, Orientations, West 86th, and most recently, The Routledge Companion to Global Renaissance Art.