Allison Caplan is a scholar of the art of Late Postclassic and early colonial Mesoamerica, with a special focus on the Nahuas (Aztecs) of Central Mexico. Her research interests include Nahua art theory and aesthetics, issues of materiality and value, animal-human relations, and the relationship between visual expression and the Nahuatl language.
Caplan’s first book, Flickering Creations: Concepts of Nahua Precious Art (Princeton University Press, to be released Oct. 2026), reconstructs Nahua theorizations of color, light, surface, and assemblage for art in precious stones, feathers, and metals, referred to in Nahuatl as tlazohtli (precious, or beloved things). The project emerges from her dissertation, which won the Best Dissertation Award from the Association for Latin American Art in 2021. Her second book, entitled The Story-Circle Manuscript: Colonial Authorship in the Drafts of the Florentine Codex, is the first in-depth study of the earliest drafts of The General History of the Things of New Spain, an early colonial history of Indigenous Nahua culture and society in Central Mexico. Her study reconstructs the illustrated manuscript as a dynamic, multivocal dialogue between multiple Nahua and Spanish writers, scribes, artists, and translators. By drawing out contributors’ distinctive voices and their interactions on the page, The Story-Circle Manuscript shows how scribal and artistic dialogue served as a structure for the work’s colonial creators to engage with and transform the Indigenous knowledge traditions they recorded.
Caplan is coeditor of the special issue of Ethnohistory, “Birds and Feathers in the Ancient and Colonial Mesoamerican World.” Her scholarship has also appeared in West 86th, MAVCOR Journal, The Routledge Companion to Global Renaissance Art, Exhibiting Animals in Europe and America (Routledge), and Mexico-Tenochtitlan: Dynamism at the Center of the World (Dumbarton Oaks Press) as well as the award-winning exhibition catalogue, Golden Kingdoms: Luxury Arts in the Ancient Americas (Getty Publications). She has additional essays forthcoming in Unfolding Stories of Latin American Art: Essays in Honor of Elizabeth H. Boone (Middle American Research Institute) and Gold in Ancient Mesoamerica (University of Texas Press).
Caplan has studied the Nahuatl language for ten years, including through two FLAS summer fellowships with the Instituto de Docencia e Investigaciones Etnológicas de Zacatecas (IDIEZ). She has also published translations and presented her research in Nahuatl as part of the Field School in Documentation, Participatory Research, Teaching, and Revitalization of Endangered Languages in Xaltipan, Tlaxcala, Mexico (2017).
Caplan’s research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Interdisciplinary Humanities Center at UC-Santa Barbara, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, Getty Research Institute, and Metropolitan Museum of Art. Prior to joining the faculty at Yale, Caplan was Assistant Professor in the History of Art and Architecture at the University of California, Santa Barbara and the inaugural Austen-Stokes Ancient Americas Postdoctoral Fellow at Johns Hopkins University. She has also worked in curatorial and education departments at several museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, American Numismatic Society, Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, and Getty Research Institute.
Caplan teaches courses on ancient and colonial Mesoamerica, Indigenous materiality and art theory, and museums and collecting. She is currently accepting graduate students in the areas of ancient and colonial Latin American art and is particularly excited to advise those interest in working at the intersection of art history and the study of Indigenous languages.