Charmaine Nelson

Clark/Oakley Humanities Fellow

Academic Year 2025-2026

Charmaine A. Nelson is a provost professor of art history and founding director of the Slavery North Initiative at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She was previously professor of art history and Research Chair in Black Diasporic Art and Community Engagement at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD) University in Halifax, Nova Scotia (2020–2022). In 2020, while at NSCAD, she launched the Institute for the Study of Canadian Slavery, the first-ever research center focused on the 200-year history of Canadian participation in Transatlantic Slavery. Prior to this appointment, she worked at McGill University in Montreal (2003–2020) and at Western University (2001–2003), where she became the first Black person appointed as a tenured or tenure-track professor of art history in Canda. Her research examines power relations, resistance, and cultural production within the context of Transatlantic Slavery. She has also written about “high” art, “low” art, and popular culture from the eighteenth century to the present. Her nine books include: The Color of Stone: Sculpting the Black Female Subject in Nineteenth-Century America (2007); Slavery, Geography, and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Marine Landscapes of Montreal and Jamaica (2016); Towards an African Canadian Art History: Art, Memory, and Resistance (2018); and The Precariousness of Freedom: Slave Resistance as Experience, Process, and Representation (2024). Nelson was recently the William Lyon Mackenzie King Visiting Professor of Canadian Studies at Harvard University (2017–2018) and a Field of the Future Research Fellow at Bard Graduate Center in New York City (2021). She is also a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (2022) and a member of the American Antiquarian Society (2022). In 2024, she received the Lifetime Achievement award from the Universities Art Association of Canada.