CUSTARD INSTITUTE AFFILIATED SCHOLARS

Luis Rueda Galán is an architectural and art historian. He holds a PhD from the École Pratique des Hautes Études – PSL in Paris and the University of Jaén. Before joining EPFL, he served as a Juan de la Cierva Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute of History (IH-CSIC) of the Spanish National Research Council in Madrid, and the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Meadows Museum-Southern Methodist University in Dallas. He has been visiting fellow at the Houghton Library – Harvard University and the Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale-IFAO in Cairo among other institutions. In 2024 he received the Gridley McKim-Smith Award from the Society for Iberian Global Art to an outstanding research article by an early-career scholar.

Luis is an expert on the legacy of al-Andalus (Islamic Iberia) in the rest of the Mediterranean and the Americas during the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period. He is also interested in the image and ideal reconstructions of the Temple of Jerusalem, as well as connections between science and architecture. At EPFL he will work on the project “The Other Antiquity. Al-Andalus and the Construction of the Global Iberian Renaissance”, which examines the role of Islamic legacy in the development of the architectural language of the Spanish and Portuguese empires in the 16th century.

Agnieszka Anna Ficek, PhD, is an art historian based in Paris, France. She is a specialist in eighteenth-century exoticisms and serves as the Research Lead of the Digital Porcelain Rooms Project, a joint endeavor between the Custard Institute of Spanish Art and Culture at SMU and the Edith O’Donnell Institute for Art History (EODIAH) at UTD. Ficek holds a PhD in Art History from the City University of New York’s Graduate Center (2023), an MA from Hunter College (2016) and undergraduate degrees from the State University of New York and the University of South Australia. Her work has been supported by many fellowships and awards, including a postdoctoral fellowship at the Custard Institute/EODIAH (2023-2026), the Houghton Library at Harvard University (2022-2023), the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University (2021), the Social Sciences Research Council (2021-2022) and the DFK-Paris (2022). Her scholarship has appeared in edited volumes, exhibition catalogues, and academic journals such as Studies of Eighteenth-Century Culture, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art Journal.

Cristina Aldrich is an art historian specializing in medieval Spain and the history of collecting, and a Ph.D. candidate at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts (expected December 2026). Her dissertation, “Inventing the Immutable Virgin: Medieval Sculpture for a Multiconfessional Castilian Society,” examines polychrome sculptures of the Virgin and Child in Castile and León and their role in shaping identity. From 2023 to 2026, she was the Center for Spain in America Curatorial Fellow at the Meadows Museum, SMU, where she curated the exhibition Unearthing the Legacy of Islamic Spain (2024–25) and directed the Madinat al-Zahra’ 3D Digitization and Research Collaborative, a cross-institutional project combining 3D scanning and art-historical research on the tenth-century Umayyad capital. Her research on Walter W.S. Cook and the transatlantic circulation of Spanish art is the subject of a co-authored book (forthcoming 2027), and she is a researcher on a Spanish government-funded project cataloguing Spain’s internationally dispersed cultural heritage. She was previously the Marica and Jan Vilcek Curatorial Fellow in Medieval Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Cloisters, worked at the Hispanic Society Museum & Library, and taught at NYU. She holds a B.A. from Cornell University and an M.A. from the Institute of Fine Arts.

Blanca Pons-Sorolla, an independent researcher and leading expert on the work of Joaquín Sorolla, her great-grandfather, is the inaugural Affiliated Scholar with the Custard Institute for Spanish Art & Culture. She is known for having curated Sorolla and America (2013–14), an exhibition that traveled from the Meadows Museum to the San Diego Museum of Art and the Fundación MAPFRE in Madrid. She also co-curated the exhibition Joaquín Sorolla (1863–1923) at the Prado in 2009. Her books include Joaquín Sorolla: Vida y obra (2001), Joaquín Sorolla (1863–1923) (2009), Sorolla: The Masterworks (2012), Sorolla and the Paris Years (2016), Sorolla. Jardines (2018), and Sorolla Catalogue Raisonné: Painting Collection of The Museo Sorolla (2019). She is a trustee of the Fundación Museo Sorolla in Madrid and chairs its standing committee. In 2009 she received the Sorolla Medal from the Hispanic Society of America in New York for her contribution to Hispanic arts and culture. Pons-Sorolla collaborated again with the Meadows Museum for their 2023 exhibition Spanish Light: Sorolla in American Collections. She is currently working on a multivolume catalogue raisonné of the artist, and, most recently, was the co-curator of the exhibit Sorolla a través de la luz at the Palacio Real in Madrid.