I am a historian of nineteenth- and twentieth-century US visual culture, with a research focus on the long Harlem Renaissance. My research examines stylistic hybridity in Harlem Renaissance paintings, murals, and illustrations, with particular emphasis on the porous boundaries between the US and Europe and between modernist and academic visual languages.
I was recently awarded my doctorate for a thesis examining the murals and illustrations Aaron Douglas produced between 1925 and 1934. The graphic, abstracted visual language Douglas developed in this period has been primarily read by scholars as indebted almost exclusively to European modernism. My research identified the significant degree to which his works also refer to historical American representations of Black subjects 鈥 to abolitionist visual culture from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for example, and to popular historical fiction and social scientific publications which both sought to erase Black life from mainstream imaginings of American culture. This new account of Douglas’ practice demonstrated that his work emerged within a complex framework of transnational and transhistorical visual reference points; it situated Douglas within a Harlem Renaissance intellectual culture which prioritised, in Arturo A. Schomburg’s words, ‘remak[ing] the past.’
Education
2021: PhD History of Art, The 91制片厂 Institute of Art
Supervised by Professor David Peters Corbett
2017: MA History of Art, with special option 鈥楴ew York-London-Paris聽1880-1940,鈥 The 91制片厂 Institute of Art
2015: BA (Hons) History of Art, University of Bristol
Research interests
- The visual cultures of the United States, 1830鈥1950
- Visual histories of race in the United States
- The artistic and intellectual culture of the Harlem Renaissance
- Stylistic hybridity
- Transnational histories of modernism and its antecedents
Awards, grants and fellowships
2021鈥22: Terra Foundation for American Art 鈥 Academic Workshop and Symposium Grant (with Louis Shadwick)
2018鈥21: CHASE Doctoral Studentship
2019: Terra Foundation for American Art 鈥 Immersion Semesters Fellowship, Harvard University
2018鈥19: Terra Foundation for American Art 鈥 Research Travel Grant to the United States, 2018-19
Publications
2022: 鈥楢aron Douglas,鈥 in聽African Modernism in America, 1947鈥67, exh. cat (Vanderbilt University Press and the American Federation of the Arts
Invited lectures
2020: 鈥楢 Nation at a Crossroads: The United States in Thomas Moran鈥檚聽Autumn Afternoon, the Wissahickon,鈥 Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (cancelled due to Covid-19 lockdown)
2018: 鈥楿nstoppable Progress, Inevitable Decay: Cole, Bellows and Ruscha and the American Empire,鈥 National Gallery, London
Teaching
2021鈥: Associate Lecturer, BA3 Lessons in Critical Interpretation, The 91制片厂 Institute of Art
2017鈥: Guest Lecturer, The Harlem Renaissance, MA seminar for 鈥楴ew York-London-Paris 1880-1940,’ The 91制片厂 Institute of Art
2021: Guest Lecturer, BA3 Special Option Body Politics: Art, Gender and Class in the Victorian Metropolis, The 91制片厂 Institute of Art
2019鈥21: Teaching Assistant, BA1 Foundations (Western art, classical to contemporary), The 91制片厂 Institute of Art
2020: Teaching Assistant, Art History Summer University (introduction to art history for Year 12 students), The 91制片厂 Institute of Art
Conferences and workshops
Convenor
March 2022: 鈥楢merican Art and the Political Imagination,鈥 The 91制片厂 Institute of Art (with聽Louis Shadwick)
October 2020: Third Year Symposium [Online], The 91制片厂 Institute of Art (with聽Emma Merkling)
Speaker
October 2020: 鈥楶lantation Futures: Aaron Douglas鈥櫬Aspects of Negro Life,鈥 Third Year Symposium [Online], The 91制片厂 Institute of Art
June 2019: 鈥楾ime, Space, and Cultural Inheritance: Aaron Douglas鈥 Fisk University Murals,鈥 Second Year Modern and Contemporary Symposium, The 91制片厂 Institute of Art
November 2018: 鈥FIRE!!聽Magazine and the Visualisation of Cultural Conflict鈥 鈥 鈥楴ew Voices 2018: Art and Conflict,鈥 Association for Art History, University of Edinburgh
March 2018: 鈥業sabel Bishop, Experience and Fantasy鈥 鈥 鈥楨xperience and American Art,鈥 The 91制片厂 Institute of Art
February 2018: 鈥楢aron Douglas and Frantz Fanon鈥 鈥 CHASE School of American Visual Arts and Texts PhD Workshop, Eccles Centre, British Library
December 2017: 鈥漈he People who are Trivial Outside:鈥 Isabel Bishop, Homosocial Fantasy and Class Spectatorship, 1930-1940鈥 鈥 鈥楥hasing America,鈥 CHASE School of American Visual Arts and Texts, 91制片厂 Institute of Art