Prominent scholar, art historian, educator, author and Canada’s first black professor of art history Charmaine A. Nelson will join the UMass Amherst Department of Art History and Architecture to teach Black Diasporic Art and Visual Culture in the fall of 2022.
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After an extended period teaching art history at McGill University from 2003 to 2020, Nelson joins UMass Amherst from the Nova Scotia College of Art and University of Design in Halifax, Canada. There, she was a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Transatlantic Black Diasporic Art and Community Engagement and founding director of the Canadian Institute for the Study of Slavery; the first research center to focus on the 200-year history of Canadian participation in transatlantic slavery.
She brings this exciting research center to UMass as the Slavery North Initiative, expanding the focus to include Canada and the American North. Slavery North will continue to host research and cultural events and support and promote research by scholars and artists-in-residence into these understudied and often neglected histories.
“I am thrilled to be joining the accomplished and dedicated faculty and staff in the Department of Art History and Architecture and equally excited to meet colleagues from across campus and the region,” says Nelson. “I know I will be inspired by the talented students and inspired by what we will learn together. “I am grateful to everyone who played a role in my coming to UMass, including former Provost John McCarthy, Provost Tricia Serio, Dean Krauthamer and Professor Monika Schmitter (department chair). Thank you for welcoming me into the UMass family!”
Nelson’s research focuses on postcolonial and black feminist studies, transatlantic slavery studies, and black diaspora studies. Her scholarship examines Canadian, American, European and Caribbean art and visual culture, including various types of “high” and “low” art and popular art forms including TV, film, photography, print culture, sculpture, painting and clothing. She also works in various genres including portraiture, still life, nude and landscape art.
“We are thrilled to welcome a new faculty member of Professor Nelson’s caliber and renown,” says Monika Schmitter, chair of the Department of Art History and Architecture. “Her expertise in black diasporic art and visual culture will undoubtedly take the department in exciting new directions.”
Nelson has received several prestigious scholarships and appointments, including a Bard Graduate Center Fields of the Future Research Fellowship in 2021; William Lyon Mackenzie King Visiting Professor of Canadian Studies at Harvard University in 2017; A Fulbright Visiting Research Chair at the University of California – Santa Barbara in 2010; and a Senior Caird Fellowship at the National Maritime Museum in the United Kingdom in 2007.
In 2020, Nelson hosted an invited seminar for UMass Amherst graduate students called Contemporary Scholars, The New Art History: Writing Transatlantic Black Diasporic Art Histories.
Nelson is the author of seven books, including Toward a History of African Canadian Art: Art, Memory and Resistance; Slavery, Geography and Empire in the Nineteenth-Century Seascapes of Montreal and Jamaica; “Black Roots, Northern Soil: Perspectives on Blackness in Canada;” “Representation of the Black Female Subject in Western Art;” “The Color of Stone: Sculpting the Black Female Subject in Nineteenth-Century America;” and she is a contributing author to many other publications. She earned her Ph.D. in art history from the University of Manchester in 2001.
To learn more about Nelson, visit blackcanadianstudies.com.
