Charmaine Nelson
Charmaine A. Nelson is a Provost Professor of Art History in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is also the Director of Slavery North, an initiative that supports scholarship and research-creation on Canadian Slavery and slavery in the American North.
From 2020 to 2022, she was a Professor of Art History and a Tier I Canada Research Chair in Transatlantic Black Diasporic Art and Community Engagement at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University (NSCAD) in Halifax, CANADA where she launched the Institute for the Study of Canadian Slavery.
Prior to this appointment she worked at McGill University (Montreal, Canada) for seventeen years (2003-2020) and at the University of Western Ontario (London, Canada) for two (2001-2003), where she became the first black person appointed as a tenured or tenure-track professor of Art History in Canada.
Nelson has made ground-breaking contributions to the fields of the Visual Culture of Slavery, Race and Representation, Black Diaspora Studies, and African American/African Canadian Art History. Much of her research examines the nature of power relations, resistance, and cultural production within the context of Transatlantic Slavery.
She has explored these issues through her writing about “high” art, “low” art, and popular culture from the eighteenth century to the present. Her seven 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), and Towards an African Canadian Art History: Art, Memory, and Resistance (2018).
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. She actively engages with lay audiences through her extensive media work including ABC, 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. She is a consultant and on-camera expert for Hungry Eyes Media’s four part, television documentary-series BLK: An Origin Story (2022) and the CBC’s Black Life: Untold Stories (2023).
Nelson launched blackcanadianstudies.com as her research website in 2012. In 2022, she reimagined it as the online Black Canadian platform, Black Maple Magazine, adding popular culture, self-care, and other content.
Nelson has also held several prestigious fellowships and appointments including a Caird Senior Research Fellowship, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, UK (2007) and a Fulbright Visiting Research Chair, University of California – Santa Barbara (2010). She was the William Lyon Mackenzie King Visiting Professor of Canadian Studies at Harvard University (2017-2018) and a Fields of the Future Research Fellow at Bard Graduate Center in New York City (2021). In 2022, she was inducted as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and elected as a member of the American Antiquarian Society.
