Contact Me
Ariane Varela Braga is an art and architectural historian working at the crossroads between the visual arts, architecture and material culture from the nineteenth century to the present.
She is pensionnaire (fellow) of the French Academy in Rome – Villa Medici (2022-2023). In Spring 2022, she was visiting professor at the Università degli studi di Milano, Italy. She is associated researcher to HISTARA at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Paris, researcher at the Latin American Center Zurich (UZH), and is currently working on her Habilitation thesis at the University of Zurich on Orientalist architecture and material culture in Italy.
Ariane Varela Braga studied at the Universities of Geneva and Neuchâtel (Ph.D. 2013, summa cum laude). She was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Zurich within the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) project ‘Mudejarismo and Moorish Revival’ (2014-2019). She taught at the University of Zurich, University of Geneva, John Cabot University, Rome, and in 2020, she obtained the Italian national academic qualification as associate professor in history of architecture.
She was awarded grants and fellowships from the the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft (Bibliotheca Hertziana), the Institut National d’histoire de l’art, Paris, the Universities of Neuchâtel and Zurich, the Swiss Institute in Rome, the Fondation Gandur pour l’Art, and the Swiss National Science Foundation. In 2021, she was Chastel Fellow at the French Academy in Rome.
She is the author of two monographs, co-edited nine volumes, and published numerous articles on the history and theory of design and architecture, with special regard to ornament and colour, and the appropriation of non-Western art in a transnational perspective. Her current research addresses issues of materiality and identity-building in nineteenth and twentieth-centuries design and architecture.
She has organized numerous international conferences and regularly presents her research at international symposiums. She is associated curator at the Vitromusée Romont, Switzerland, and has co-curated exhibitions on the arts of the nineteenth and twentieth-centuries in Switzerland, Germany, Italy and Brazil.
She is co-coordinator of NeReMa – International Network for Marble and Decorative Stones, and a founding member of the Swiss Network for Historicism. She serves as peer-reviewer for international scientific journals and academic publishing houses, and is co-editor of the art and architectural history series Pensieri ad arte (Editoriale Artemide, Rome).