Associate Professor of Art History and Visual Culture
Art and Art History
Terra Foundation Visiting Professor of American Art
Oxford University, 2019-2020
The Primers | The Photographers | The Progressives | The Pragmatists
Moderator: Alastair Wright, Head of the History of Art Department and Tutorial Fellow in Art History at St John’s College, Oxford
This lecture examines the factors that influenced the development of pedagogical strategies for reading and realizing the portrait as conceived for students at Historically Black Colleges and Universities during the post-bellum era. Through illustrations in etiquette books and early photography, I trace the precedents for the ideological situating of black subjectivity within the politics of respectability that later inform the rhetorical trope of the New Negro.