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Prominent scholar, art historian, educator, author and the first-ever Black professor of art history in Canada Charmaine A. Nelson will join the UMass Amherst Department of History of Art and Architecture to teach Black Diasporic Art and Visual Culture in fall 2022.

Following an extended period of teaching art history at McGill University from 2003 to 2020, Nelson joins UMass Amherst from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University in Halifax, Canada. There, she was a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Transatlantic Black Diasporic Art and Community Engagement and the founding director of the Institute for the Study of Canadian Slavery, the first research center to focus on the 200-year history of Canadian participation in Transatlantic Slavery.

She brings this research hub to UMass as the Slavery North Initiative, expanding the focus to include both Canada and the American North. Slavery North will continue to host research and cultural events and to support and promote the research of scholars and artists-in-residence in these understudied and often neglected histories.

Nelson’s research is focused on postcolonial and Black feminist scholarship, 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 dress.

Nelson is the author of seven books including “Towards an African Canadian Art History: Art, Memory, and Resistance;” “Slavery, Geography, and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Marine Landscapes of Montreal and Jamaica;” “Ebony Roots, Northern Soil: Perspectives on Blackness in Canada;” “Representing 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 for many other publications.

“We are thrilled to welcome a new faculty member of Professor Nelson’s caliber and renown,” says Monika Schmitter, chair of the Department of History of Art and Architecture. “Her expertise in Black diasporic art and visual culture will undoubtedly take the department in exciting new directions.

Visit professor Nelson's faculty page for more information!