Roxanne Goldberg

Roxanne Goldberg is an art historian and academic editor. In 2025–26, she will be a PostDoc at ETH Zürich. Roxanne's research examines how discourses of race and religion are negotiated through collections and displays of material culture. She explores these questions in her dissertation, "Persian Lessons: Islamic Art in America, 1876–1925." Situating micro-historical episodes of collecting, classifying, displaying, studying, and otherwise engaging with Islamic art within religious and political contexts at municipal and global scales, "Persian Lessons" reveals the surprising story of how Islamic art was instrumentalized in the service of competing American identities and ideologies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Roxanne previously held curatorial research positions at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore.