Amy Y.T. Chang

Amy Y.T. Chang works on the art and architecture of the Spanish Empire and the results of its contact with Indo-Pacific cultures in the 16th-18th centuries. 

She specializes in Spanish architectural theory, stylistic censorship, environmental engineering, and environmental representation. Her current work focuses on the Spanish encounter with Islamic cultural heritage in Andalusia and in the Iberian Indo-Pacific; as well as on the migrations and transformations of the Spanish and Italian Renaissance and Baroque in Iberian Asia. She pays particular attention to imperial contact with pre-existing local architectural traditions, alternative antiquarianisms, and the vegetal arts of island Southeast Asia. 

Amy's writing has appeared in exhibition catalogues for the Prado Museum in Madrid, the Spanish Embassy in Washington, DC; and in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. She has co-curated exhibitions for Dumbarton Oaks and the New York Botanical Garden on botanical exchange and cultural transformation in the liquid cultures of the Red Sea and Indian Ocean, and has active curatorial projects in co-development in Southeast Asia. 

She was the 2024-2026 Samuel H. Kress Foundation Institutional Fellow at the Bibliotheca Hertziana–Max Planck Institute for Art History in Rome, and her work has been supported by the Graham Foundation, the Mellon, Dumbarton Oaks, Villa i Tatti, and Harvard Asia Center, among others.