Charmaine Nelson

Charmaine A. Nelson is a Provost Professor of Art History and the founding Director of the Slavery North Initiative which supports research and research creation on the study of Canadian Slavery and slavery in the American North. Prior this appointment in 2022, she was a Professor of Art History and a Tier I Canada Research Chair in Black Diasporic Art and Community Engagement at NSCAD University in Halifax, Canada (2020-2022) where she founded the Institute for the Study of Canadian Slavery, the first-ever research center focused on the overlooked 200-year history of Canadian participation in Transatlantic Slavery. As the director of the Institute, she did considerable public outreach in the form of lectures, media interviews, blogs, and podcasts. She also organized panels and oversaw the competition for the first cohort of seven institute fellows. Nelson worked at McGill University (Montreal, Quebec) for seventeen years (2003-2020) and at Western University (London, Ontario) for two (2001-2003), where she became the first black person appointed as a tenured or tenure-track professor of Art History in Canada. She received her PhD in Art History from the University of Manchester in 2001.

Nelson has made ground-breaking contributions to the fields of the Visual Culture of Slavery, Race and Representation, and Black Canadian Studies. Much of her research examines the nature of power relations, resistance, and cultural production within the context of Transatlantic Slavery. Her research examines “high” art, “low” art, and popular culture from the eighteenth century to the present.

An incredibly active scholar, Nelson has given over 300 lectures, papers, and talks across Canada, and the USA, and in Mexico, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Norway, Spain, the UK, Central America, and the Caribbean. Her university lectures include Harvard, Oxford, Princeton, Stanford, the University of Toronto, the University of British Columbia, and Yale. She is also actively engaged with lay audiences through her media work including ABC, Aljazeera, CBC, CTV, BBC One, The Boston Globe, The New York Times, and PBS. She has blogged for the Huffington Post Canada and written for The Walrus. Nelson is a consultant and on-camera expert for Hungry Eyes Media’s BLK: An Origin Story (2022) and the CBC’s Black Life: A Canadian History (2023). Since 2012, she has also maintained a vibrant research website - blackcanadianstudies.com - which she recently reimagined in 2023 as one of Canada's first national black magazines, Black Maple Magazine. 

An award-winning teacher, she prioritizes the training of undergraduate students in primary research practices and creates publication platforms for the original research they have produced under her tutelage. She has published the open access, undergraduate student e-journal, Chrysalis: A Critical Student Journal of Transformative Art History, since 2014.

Nelson has also held several prestigious fellowships and appointments including a Caird Senior Research Fellowship, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, UK (2007), a Fulbright Visiting Research Chair, University of California – Santa Barbara (2010), the William Lyon Mackenzie King Visiting Professorship in Canadian Studies at Harvard University (2017-2018), and a Fields of the Future Research Fellowship at Bard Graduate Center in New York City (2021). She is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (2022).

Nelson’s research and supervisory interests encompass the art and visual cultures of Canada, the Caribbean, the USA, and Europe through the lens of the Black Diaspora. Her interdisciplinary research interests span from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries and contribute to various fields including African American/Canadian Art History, Black Canadian Studies, Race and Representation, and the Visual Culture of Slavery. She interrogates the limits of access to self- and community-representation of enslaved Black populations and the nature and outcomes of white-dominated representation of Black populations.