Megan E. O'NeilAssistant Professor of Art History; Faculty Curator, Art of the Americas, Michael C. Carlos Museum
Emory courses taught by Professor O'Neil:
- Art and Architecture of the Mesoamerica
- Materiality and the Senses in the Art of the Ancient Americas
- Histories and Ethics: Indigenous Arts of the Americas in Museums
Megan E. O'Neil, Associate Professor of Art History at Emory University, is a specialist in the ancient Maya and other cultures of the ancient Americas. One aspect of her research focuses on ancient Maya creation of and engagement with stone sculptures, explored in two books, Engaging Ancient Maya Sculpture at Piedras Negras, Guatemala (Oklahoma, 2012) and Memory in Fragments: The Lives of Ancient Maya Sculptures (Texas, 2024). She also has published multiple articles in journals and edited volumes about Maya sculpture, painting, and ceramics that address topics such as iconoclasm, touch and tactility, and materiality, and published a revised edition of Maya Art and Architecture (Thames and Hudson, 2014), co-authored with Mary Miller. Her research on Maya ceramics appears in the edited volume, The Science and Art of Maya Painted Ceramics: Contextualizing a Collection (LACMA, 2022), and the exhibition catalog, Picture Worlds: Storytelling on Greek, Moche, and Maya Pottery (co-edited with David Saunders). Dr. O'Neil also researches histories of collecting, exhibition, and the reception of Mesoamerican art and culture into the modern day, as explored in her book The Maya (Reaktion Books, 2022) and in essays in Collecting Mesoamerican Art before 1940 (Getty, 2024).
