As of July 1st, 2025, Holly Shaffer has been awarded tenure and promoted to Associate Professor of the History of Art & Architecture.

Professor Shaffer also recently published an article with the Huntington Library Quarterly titled, “Provisioners, Cooks, Coffeehouses, and Clubs: Exhibiting Taste in Calcutta and London in the Early Nineteenth Century.” By considering food and art together, Shaffer's essay recognizes how the belly of the empire shaped its arts and influenced spaces like coffeehouses and clubs in which the two tastes—gustatory and aesthetic—fused. Read the full piece here.

Forthcoming with the Yale Center for British Art (YCBA), Professor Shaffer is co-curating an exhibition with Assistant Curator of Prints and Drawings at the YCBA, Laurel O. Peterson. The show, Painters, Ports, and Profits Artists and the East India Company, 1750-1850, will open in January 2026, and is accompanied by a catalogue also co-edited by Shaffer and Peterson, published by Yale University Press.

Shaffer and Peterson spoke about their work and this show at the Paul Mellon Centre in February of 2025. Learn more here.