George Flaherty is an Associate Professor of Latin American and Latinx Art History and Director of the Center for Latin American Visual Studies (CLAVIS) at the University of Texas at Austin. His research and teaching focus primarily on visual, urban, and media cultures in twentieth-century and contemporary Latin America and the Latinx U.S., with emphases on Mexico, the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, and their diasporas in the U.S. His interests extend to the urban humanities, Afro-Latin American and -Latinx studies, and postcolonial and subaltern studies.

His current book project explores exchanges, affinities, and appropriations between the Harlem Renaissance and Mexican Renaissance of the 1920s and 30s. Other research projects include architecture and environment at the U.S.-Mexico borderlands and Latinx experimental film and video.

His first book, Hotel Mexico: Dwelling on the ’68 Movement (University of California Press 2016), investigated the spatial dimensions of the 1968 student-led democratization movement in Mexico City and its afterlives. This project received support from the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (National Gallery of Art, Washington), Social Science Research Council, Society of Architectural Historians, and a Fulbright-García Robles grant to Mexico City, where he was a visiting scholar at the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Hotel Mexico was recognized with the Arvey Book Award from the Association of Latin American Art in 2017.

Flaherty’s essays and reviews have appeared in Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Art in Translation, and History of Photography, as well as several anthologies and exhibitions catalogs, including La Raza (2019), Mexico Modern: Art, Commerce, and Cultural Exchange (2017), Genealogías del arte contemporáneo en México, 1952-1967 (2015), Defying Stability: Artistic Processes in Mexico, 1952-1967 (2014), and Latin American Modern Architectures: Ambiguous Territories (2012).

He has lectured at the Universidad de los Andes, Centro Nacional de Arte Contemporáneo Cerrillos, University of Chicago, Stanford University, Dartmouth College, Williams College, and Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo.

From 2012-2018 he was co-principal investigator, with Dr. Andrea Giunta (Universidad de Buenos Aires), of “Grounds for Comparison: Neo-Vanguards and Latin American/U.S. Latino Art, 1960-90,” a series of research seminars and publications for emerging scholars from across the Americas sponsored by the Getty Foundation’s Connecting Art Histories initiative. He is co-editor, with Giunta, of related research dossiers in the journals Artelogie and Caiana.

In 2018, he co-convened with Dr. Robin Greeley (University of Connecticut) the “Precarity, Resistance and Art from the Americas” Colloquium at the Clark Art Institute, with support from the Mellon Foundation.

Flaherty has also contributed to curatorial projects at the Autry Museum of the American West, Harry Ransom Center, Centro Cultural Universitario Tlatelolco, and Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and served on the editorial board of Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies.

He is a graduate of Swarthmore College and the University of California at Santa Barbara (Ph.D. 2011).