Pascale Rihouet

Pascale Rihouet is a French-American art historian specializing in European art, 1400–1800. At RISD since 2008, she has taught courses in that field in addition to topics such as the history of glass, performance art, modern and post-modern art, history of drawing. She created two courses delivered year on year (Wintersession) in which history, design, art, critical making, ethics and sustainability coalesce: Tea, Coffee, or Chocolate? and Bittersweet Chocolate. She has widely published on Renaissance art and ritual, material culture and group identity in English, French and Italian academic journals as well as two books Art Moves: The Material Culture of Processions in Renaissance Perugia (Brepols, 2019) and, as co-editor and co-author, Eternal Ephemera: The Papal Possesso and its Legacies in Early Modern Rome (Toronto University Press, 2020). Her research on prints of papal processions earned her a six-week Villa Medici grant in 2019. Pascale is currently finishing a monograph on Roman festival prints of the possesso procession (1589-1775) to be published by Routledge. After working as an administrator for two years, she became a part-time professor at IESA arts & culture in 2023, an art management school in Paris.

Pascale regularly participates in conferences presenting on her two fields of expertise (processions and food history). She was executive director of the New England Renaissance Conference Motion, Rhythm, Shift (RISD Museum, October 2019) and TRANS-DIGITAL: Transitions and transformations of arts and culture in the age of a pandemic (2020–21) (University of Chicago-Paris/IESA). At CAA 2021, she chaired and organized the session Coffee or Chocolate? The Art and Design of Colonial Conquest and delivered a paper called Coffee or Chocolate? Sociability and Invisibility. She contributed to the audio recording Coffee and Chocolate for the Trading Earth: Ceramics, Commodities, and Commerce exhibition at the RISD Museum (April 2022-January 2025). In 2023–24, she passed Levels 1 and 2 of the IICCT (International Institute for Chocolate and Cacao tasting), a certification accredited by FDQ (UK government).