Pascale Rihouet

Pascale Rihouet is a French-American art historian specializing in European art from 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 and history of drawing. She created two courses delivered year on year 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 writing a monograph on Roman festival prints focused on the possesso procession (1589–1775).

Pascale was executive director of the New England Renaissance Conference Motion, Rhythm, Shift (RISD Museum, October 2019). She is a tenured part-time teacher at IESA arts&culture (an art management school in Paris) where she set up in collaboration with the University of Chicago in Paris TRANS-DIGITAL: Transitions and transformations of arts and culture in the age of a pandemic (2020–21). At CAA 2021, she chaired and organized the session entitled 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 exhibition Trading Earth: Ceramics, Commodities, and Commerce at the RISD Museum (April 2022-January 2024). In June 2023, she passed the Level 1 of the IICCT (International Institute for Chocolate and Cacao Tasting), a certification accredited by FDQ (UK government). Pascale keeps researching the iconography of chocolate and coffee in 18th-century art for a future publication.