Brendan McMahon

Brendan C. McMahon is a specialist in the visual and material culture of the early modern Spanish world, and his research and teaching address the complicated lives of objects that were created, circulated, and consumed within that context. He is interested in understanding the factors that facilitated physical and cultural mobility, the relationship between makers, viewers, and the natural world, and, especially, the role that materials play in intellectual history. As such, much of his work is concerned with understanding historical episodes in which specific qualities of matter transformed objects made from those substances into tools of thought for individuals navigating the varied challenges presented by early modernity. 

His first book, Iridescence and the Image: Material Thinking in the Early Modern Spanish World (Penn State Press, 2025), is the first to observe and interrogate the ubiquitous presence of iridescent matter--including shot fabrics, hummingbird feathers, opals, and mother of pearl--in objects and texts produced in Spain and Mexico around the turn of the seventeenth century. It argues that their presence in everything from paintings and prints, poetry and political tracts stemmed from the intellectual value of the specific effects on display in these vibrant materials, whose surfaces appeared to change colors depending upon the angle of view or illumiation. Their shifting hues provided a diverse array of individuals on either side of the Spanish Atlantic with the means to think through a series of fundamental questions about seeming and being, deception and revelation, and the nature of truth itself. It is the recipient of a 2026 Eleanor Tufts Award honorable mention from the Society for Iberian Global Art.

A second monograph, tentatively titled "Tecali's Four Lives: Stone and Settling in Colonial Mexico," examines the production and reception of objects carved from a banded travertine stone mined outside the city of Puebla, Mexico. It uses this corpus to assess the role of objects in the maintenance of settler colonialism, arguing that geological knowledge served to naturalize settler populations in relation to the land they claimed as their own. Ultimately, it explores how ideas about place are forged through the careful consideration of materials.

Prior to joining the full-time faculty at the University of Michigan, McMahon was a postdoctoral scholar in the Michigan Society of Fellows. His research has been supported by an Andrew W. Mellon predoctoral fellowship from the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, as well as grants from the Fulbright Foundation. His writing has appeared in Renaissance Quarterly, Art Bulletin, and Art History, among other publications.

Field(s) of study

• Visual and material culture of the early modern Spanish World (particularly Mexico and Spain)
• Materiality-Intellectual history
• Circulation and mobility
• The Iberian Pacific
• The history of ornithology