Rate My Professor Caitlin DiMartino

Caitlin Irene DiMartino is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Art History at Bowdoin College. She earned her PhD in Art History from Northwestern University in 2024, with a dissertation titled Resplendent Darkness: Black Madonnas and the Making of Race in France and Spain, 1550–1750. Prior degrees include an MA from the University of Texas at Austin and a BA from Muhlenberg College. Before entering graduate school, she served as a teaching assistant in a bilingual elementary school in Collado Villalba, Spain. Currently, DiMartino is a Faculty Fellow in the 2025-2026 cohort at Bowdoin’s Baldwin Center for Learning and Teaching, where she is preparing her Spring 2026 course, Unmaking Empire: The Art of Colonial Latin America, and collaborating on inclusive pedagogical practices.

A specialist in late medieval and early modern art, DiMartino’s research broadly addresses the interplay between devotional imagery, materiality, and shifting notions of race and gender in Western Europe and Latin America before 1700. She is particularly interested in early modern ideas about the transmutation of matter and its connections to the perceived permanence or impermanence of bodily states. Her first book project, Resplendent Darkness: Black Madonnas and the Materiality of Race in Early Modern Europe, examines the periodization of premodern race and blackness via the phenomenon of “Black Madonnas” in Spain, France, and Italy from the late fifteenth to early eighteenth centuries. Informed by Premodern Critical Race Studies and Black Feminist Theory, the work argues that Marian blackness functioned as a metaphor for racialized desire and religious transformation, underscoring the spiritual and material significance of black skin in bolstering the white, Christian body politic. In her teaching at Bowdoin, DiMartino expands the geographical, material, and thematic scopes of Renaissance and Baroque art history, encouraging students to consider early modern European artistic developments as shaped by intercultural exchanges with Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Previously, she held the Block Graduate Curatorial Fellowship at Northwestern University from 2019 to 2020.