Born in 1984 in Los Angeles (USA), Hyman studied at the University of California, Berkeley and Yale University before receiving his PhD from the Department of History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley in 2017. That same year, he was appointed Assistant Professor in the Department of the History of Art at Johns Hopkins University, where he was promoted to the rank of Associate Professor. During this time, he also held the positions of Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Department of Drawings & Prints at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and Visiting Professor in the Institute for Art History at the University of Bern in the ERC-funded “Global Horizons in Pre-Modern Art” project. Among other awards and fellowships, Hyman has held senior fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Newberry Library, and the Thoma Foundation.

Much of Hyman’s scholarship has worked to connect once-disparate art historical fields and geographies. His first book, Rubens in Repeat: The Logic of the Copy in Colonial Latin America (Getty Research Institute, 2021), treats works of art in Spain’s American viceroyalties that were “copied” from prints by the Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens. The book’s transatlantic frame stages a reassessment of how works of art exist in relationship across geographic distances and cultural divides, and a reconceptualization of key terms of early modern artistic practice and authorship. Other work in this area includes several collaborative projects with Prof. Stephanie Porras (Tulane University) about the “Dutch Americas,” including a 2025 edited volume in the Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek.

Hyman is currently completing a second monograph: Formalities: Seeing Script in Art of the Early Modern Spanish World. This bookexamines the unusual quantity of written words on works of art created from c. 1540–1700 across the transatlantic Spanish Empire and focuses specifically on the visual and material dimensions of letterforms and documents. Doing so reveals artists drawing upon scripts to craft pictorial performances of the written word that capitalized on imperial subjects’ acute awareness of the visual signification of writing and the resonance of scripts with specific types of documents, objects, and social registers. The project pushes at the limits of archival studies and Schriftbildlichkeit to explain overlooked visual features of written communication and reframe art history’s relationship to “the archive”— conceived as a place equally important for seeing as for reading.

• Cultural transfer, Global Art History, the Geography of Art
• Intermediality
• Word-Image Studies, Schriftbildlichkeit, Media Studies
• Historiography of the discipline of Art History
• Graphic works and rare books before 1800