Team

Charmaine A. Nelson was appointed to the position of Provost Professor of Art History in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Massachusetts – Amherst in 2022. She did her undergraduate and MA in Art History at Concordia University (Montreal, Canada) and her PhD in the same discipline at the University of Manchester, UK. From 2020 to 2022, she was a Professor of Art History and a Tier I Canada Research Chair in Black Diasporic Art and Community Engagement at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University (NSCAD) in Halifax, CANADA. 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.

In 2020 at NSCAD she launched the Institute for the Study of Canadian Slavery, the first-ever research centre focused on the overlooked 200-year history of Canadian participation in Transatlantic Slavery. As the director of the Institute, Charmaine created impressive research outcomes and did considerable public outreach in the form of blogs, lectures, media interviews, podcasts, an art exhibition, and an international workshop. She also organized panels and oversaw the competition for the first two cohorts of seven institute fellows (2021-2022) comprised of graduate students and artists-in-residence. Charmaine now brings this promising research centre to Amherst in the form of the Slavery North Initiative which will retain its focus on Canadian Slavery while expanding its scope to also focus on the understudied histories of slavery in the American North.

Charmaine 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 and her research has been supported by several major grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and Fonds québecois de la recherche sur la sociéte et la culture. An award-winning teacher, she actively mentors her students, instructing them in primary research practices and methods, and creating platforms for the dissemination of their original, course-generated research including her open access, online undergraduate student journal, Chrysalis: A Critical Student Journal of Transformative Art History.

Much of Charmaine’s 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). She is currently working on four manuscripts, two edited volumes that focus upon creolization and visual and material cultures of slavery, and slave resistance, and two single authored books including a comparative study of fugitive slave advertisements in Canada and Jamaica and the biography of an enslaved black man in Quebec City.

An incredibly active scholar, Charmaine 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 British Columbia, the University of Toronto, and Yale. She also creates fora for other scholars through extensive conference and workshop organization and co-organization that includes seven such international events. Charmaine actively engages with lay audiences through her 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 forthcoming Black Life: A Canadian History (release tbd). She 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).

Katelyn Clark is in the fourth year of her undergraduate degree at the University of Prince Edward Island. She is majoring in Applied Communication, Leadership, and Culture and has a strong interest in community engagement. Her academic interests include issues related to race and identity formation in Canada.

Emily Davidson is a settler artist, activist, graphic designer, and parent based in Kjipuktuk/Halifax, Nova Scotia. Her artistic practice uses printmaking to investigate the history of leftist political movements, imagine utopian futures, and agitate for social justice causes. Her current research focuses on the entangled relationship of print media in historic and ongoing colonization across Turtle Island, and the formation of settler-colonial states on Indigenous lands. Emily graduated from NSCAD University in 2009 (BFA, Interdisciplinary) and is a current MFA candidate at NSCAD. Emily is a recipient of the Canada Graduate Scholarships-Master’s Program in Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).

Colleen MacIsaac (they/she) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Kjipuktuk/Halifax, creating work across performance, drawing, animation, comics, installation, theatre, printed matter, and video, exploring themes of communication, connection, queerness, climate grief, and counter-mapping. A winner of the Halifax Mayor’s Award for Emerging Theatre Artist, the Helen Hill Animated Award, and the Bhayana Invisible Champion Award, they graduated from Emily Carr University in 2007 with a BMA in Animation. They are currently an MFA candidate at NSCAD University.

Britt Moore-Shirley (they/them) is a white-settler non-binary media artist, researcher, and arts administrator currently based in Kjipuktuk in Mi’kma’ki (Halifax, Nova Scotia). Through multi-media installation, performance, and printed matter, they examine currents of exchange between intimate personal histories and the public sphere. They complicate personal and collective histories with layers of materials and technologies and aim to navigate difficult conversations and practices in spaces of care and community. As a writer and researcher, they are interested in feminist theory, fat politics, and trauma-informed practices, particularly as they intersect with conversations about technology, media representation, and digital embodiment.

Achini Ranasinghege (Pabi) is a photographic artist and an archival researcher. Her current research focuses on the nineteenth-century colonial Ceylon (Sri Lanka). Through close reading, she investigates the nineteenth-century photography of Ceylon and how it was influenced/impacted by Victorian Visual culture (as a British colony). Pabi is an MA graduate of Art Education at NSCAD University. She finished her BA at the University of Kelaniya in 2013 (Image arts) and worked as a university tutor/lecturer.

Dr. Lucinda Canty joined the Elaine Marieb College of Nursing faculty in 2022. She is an Associate Professor of Nursing, and Director of Seedsworks Health Equity in Nursing Program at the University of Massachusetts – Amherst. Her current role in academics is grounded in and enriched by over 29 years in clinical practice as a nurse midwife. Lucinda continues to provide women’s health care. She did her Bachelor of Science in nursing at Columbia University, her Master of science in nursing at Yale University specializing in nurse-midwifery, and her PhD at the University of Connecticut. Her dissertation was entitled It’s Not Always Rainbows and Unicorns: The Lived Experience of Severe Maternal Morbidity among Black Women.

Lucinda is an artist, poet, and historian. Her research interests include the prevention of maternal mortality and severe maternal morbidity, reducing racial and ethnic health disparities in reproductive health, and eliminating racism in nursing and midwifery. Her scholarship centers on the voices and experiences of Black women to identify factors that contribute to poor maternal health outcomes and develop community initiatives to health and wellness. Her scholarship has led to the development of Lucinda’s House, a Black Maternal Health Collective, to promote maternal health equity through community collaboration and programs that provide support and education.

Lucinda is co-creator and host of Overdue Reckoning with Racism in Nursing, launched in September 2020, which opened discussions that focused on coming to terms with racism in nursing which has inspired a process of healing and change. Between 110-120 nurses have participated in each session from across North America, the United Kingdom, and South Africa. This program has resulted in ongoing monthly zoom meetings to provide support and discuss solutions. AJN published an article in February 2022 about the initiative which featured her art and poetry. The Overdue Reckoning on Racism in Nursing article won a 2023 Clarion award for Magazine Feature Article, External Publication. Hearing the stories of nurses of color led to the RNs Reckoning with Racism in Nursing documentary project which led to interviews with over 40 nurses of color. This documentary has impacted the profession through symposia, workshops, and curricula.

Lucinda is a sought after nurse scholar in addressing both maternal health equity and anti-racism initiatives. She has presented her research on local, regional, national, and international levels, for invited and peer-reviewed presentations. Her national level impact not only draws attention to the maternal health crisis in the United States, it also draws attention to actionable solutions.

In 2022, Lucinda was one of seven nurses invited to the White House for a Nursing Roundtable for the Gender Policy Committee. She spoke about factors contributing to racial disparities in maternal health and her work with Lucinda’s House. She was a consultant on two major reports for the Government Accountability Office: COVID-19 and the impact on maternal health; and increasing diversity in the midwifery workforce. She is a member of the National Commission to Address Racism in Nursing.

In 2022, Lucinda was inducted as a Fellow into the American College of Nurse Midwives.  On October 7, 2023, she will be inducted into the American Academy of Nursing.

Julia Jorati’s research focuses on philosophical debates about slavery in Europe and the Americas in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. She received an MA from the University of Göttingen (Germany) in 2008 and a PhD from Yale in 2013; she was on the faculty of the Ohio State University for six years before coming to UMass in 2019.

In her most recent book Slavery and Race: Philosophical Debates in the Eighteenth Century and in its companion volume Slavery and Race: Philosophical Debates in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Oxford University Press 2024), Jorati surveys the philosophically most central portions of antislavery and proslavery texts composed between 1500 and 1800 in Europe and the Americas, with a focus on the role of race. In doing so, she explores the association between Blackness and slavery during this period and examines how common it was for White people to view Black people as naturally destined for slavery. In addition to examining well-known authors like John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Jorati also discusses less widely studied philosophers like Alonso de Sandoval, Epifanio de Moirans, Ottobah Cugoano, Lemuel Haynes, and Olympe de Gouges. By revealing important aspects of debates about slavery in the Americas and Europe, these two volumes aim to be valuable resources for readers interested in a more complete history of early modern philosophy.

Jorati is currently working on two larger projects. One is an anthology of selected primary texts about slavery from the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries; the other is a book-length study of antislavery and proslavery discourse in Massachusetts between 1773 and 1783—the last ten years in which slavery was legal in the commonwealth. During these ten years, there were intense debates about slavery, fueled in part by the ideals of the American Revolution. The project analyzes the philosophical principles employed by antislavery and proslavery authors in these debates. It focuses on essays and letters published by Black and White authors in Massachusetts newspapers, various pamphlets, a public disputation about slavery presented at the 1773 Harvard commencement by two White undergraduates, and several petitions by Black Massachusetts residents demanding abolition or, in at least one case, reparations. This project aims to facilitate a deeper understanding of the history of slavery in Massachusetts and its legacy.

Aaron Kamugisha is a scholar of the social, political and cultural thought of the African diaspora. He holds a doctorate in Social and Political Thought from York University, was the 2007/8 postdoctoral fellow in African-American Studies at Northwestern University, and taught at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus for over a decade. He serves on the editorial boards of the following journals: Small Axe: A Journal of Caribbean Criticism, Social and Economic Studies, and the Journal of West Indian Literature, as is a member of the managing editorial board of American Quarterly. He is also the co-executive director of the Race and Resistance book series with Peter Lang Publishers, and an inaugural member of the Other Universals transnational research collective.

His primary intellectual and research interests encompass the intellectual history and the social, political and cultural thought of the African Diaspora. His latest book, Beyond Coloniality: Citizenship and Freedom in the Caribbean Intellectual Tradition was published by Indiana University Press with a simultaneous edition by University of Witwatersrand Press in March 2019. He is the editor of seven edited collections on Caribbean and Africana thought, including Caribbean Political Thought: The Colonial State to Caribbean Internationalisms (2013), Caribbean Political Thought: Theories of the Post-Colonial State (2013), (with Yanique Hume) Caribbean Cultural Thought: From Plantation to Diaspora (2013), Caribbean Popular Culture: Power, Politics and Performance (2016), and (along with 14 other editors) The Routledge Reader in African American Rhetoric: The Long Duree of Black Voices (2018). He has also edited special issues of six journals: (with Alissa Trotz) a special issue of Race & Class (October 2007) “Caribbean Trajectories: 200 Years On” to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the British abolishment of the slave trade; (with Peter Hudson) The C.L.R. James Journal special issue on Black Canadian Thought (Fall 2014); Small Axe 49 (March 2016) on Sylvia Wynter’s Black Metamorphosis, (with Jane Gordon, Lewis Gordon and Neil Roberts) The Antigua and Barbuda Review of Books (Summer 2017), Small Axe 64 (March 2021) on Caribbean Intellectual History and Small Axe 67 (March 2022) a Homage to Kamau Brathwaite.

Kathy Roberts Forde is Professor of Journalism and Associate Dean for Equity and Inclusion in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is co-editor and contributing author of the book Journalism and Jim Crow: White Supremacy and the Black Struggle for a New America (University of Illinois Press, 2021), which received the American Historical Association Palmegiano Book Award, the AEJMC History Division Book Award, and the American Journalism Historians Association Book Award. A U.S. press historian, Kathy is working on a new book about the role of the white press in racial massacres—instigating, organizing, and covering up racial massacres for generations after the Civil War—and the role of the Black press in exposing these atrocities and attempting to hold those responsible to account. Kathy was raised in rural East Tennessee in Appalachia.

Sarah Stefana Smith is an interdisciplinary scholar and visual artist. Their research communicates between the fields of Black art and culture, queer of color critique and affect studies, performance and aesthetics. Smith’s studio practice looks towards the blur between abstraction and representation, infrastructure and materiality, space and ecology in photography, installation, and sculptural work. As a teacher Smith is interested in cross-pollination between matter and materiality and boundaries between human and species, lines of demarcation around difference – race, gender, sexuality – and how modes of difference are used to constitute and congeal belonging.

Smith was a recipient of an Art and Change Grant from the Leeway Foundation, an Ontario Arts Council Grant, and a John Pavlis Fellowship as an artist in residence at the Vermont Studio Center. Smith has published in The Black Scholar, Women & Performance, Drain Journal of Art and Culture, The Palgrave Handbook of Race and the Arts Education and in Ruptures: Anti-colonial and Anti-Racist Feminist Theorizing. Their residency experiences have included the University of Pittsburgh Creativities Project, Merriweather District AIR, 77Arts, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts among others. Smith has exhibited at various spaces including Waller Gallery, Arlington Art Center, DC Art Center, the Borland Project Space, and Gallery CA.

Jacob Dyer Spiegel earned his Ph.D. in English from the University of Massachusetts Amherst where he focused on West African and Afro-Caribbean religions and aesthetic philosophies in the literatures, visual arts, and performing arts of the African Diaspora. Moving across English, Spanish, and Portuguese — and entirely indebted to the work of Robert Farris Thompson, Kamau Brathwaite, Nathaniel Mackey, Wilson Harris, and Lydia Cabrera — the project pursued the trope of the crossroads and codified layers of translation. He holds an M.A. in Latin American and Caribbean Cultural Studies from Universidad de la Habana in Cuba.

As a Fulbright Scholar to Brazil, Jacob turned the writing and research into a full-immersion experiential learning school in Salvador da Bahia. He adapted and managed a similar initiative in Nassau, The Bahamas while teaching in the English Department at the national university. His current work applies Kamau Brathwaite’s Nation Language system as well as postcolonial translation theories to composition studies, highlighting how Brathwaite’s cultural-linguistic system can contextualize the writing task and anchor written and oral expression in rich language contact zones across the African Diaspora. His chapter in Creole Composition: Academic Writing and Rhetoric in the Anglophone Caribbean (Parlor Press, 2019) examines the ways in which Nation Language reconfigured the emotive experience of writing while opening space for “translingual,” multimodal composing which often mirrored aspects of translation. The book, Creole Composition, won the Modern Language Association’s 36th Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize (2020) and the Conference on College Composition & Communication Outstanding Book Award (2020). As Lecturer, Jacob teaches professional writing and communication courses in the Isenberg School of Management at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Timothy D. Walker (B.A., Hiram College, 1986; M.A., Ph.D., Boston University, 2001) is Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, where he serves on the Executive Board of the Center for Portuguese Studies and Culture, and is an affiliated faculty member of the programs in Black Studies and Women’s & Gender Studies.  He is a scholar of maritime history, colonial overseas expansion, and trans-oceanic slave trading, and is an Affiliated Researcher of the Centro de História d’Aquém e d’Além-Mar (CHAM); Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal.

Walker was a visiting professor at the Universidade Aberta in Lisbon (1994-2003) and at Brown University (2010).  He is the recipient of a Fulbright dissertation fellowship to Portugal (1996-1997), a doctoral research fellowship from the Portuguese Camões Institute (1995-1996), and a NEH-funded American Institute for Indian Studies Professional Development Grant for post-doctoral work in Goa, India (2000-2002). Walker has also been named a fellow of the Fundação Oriente in Portugal, the Luso-American Development Foundation (2003 & 2008), and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (2010-2011).

In 2018 Walker was appointed a Guest Investigator of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, drawing historic climate data from archived whaling logbooks, Portuguese colonial, and other maritime documentation. He has taught maritime history aboard numerous traditionally rigged sailing vessels, and is a contributing faculty member of the Munson Institute of Maritime Studies (Mystic, Connecticut).

Walker is the Director of the National Endowment for the Humanities “Landmarks in American History” workshops series, titled “Sailing to Freedom:  New Bedford and the Underground Railroad” (2011–2022).  He co-curated the cultural/historical exhibition “Sailing to Freedom:  Maritime Dimensions of the Underground Railroad” and co-directed a public history conference of the same name (New Bedford Whaling Museum, 2022).  The conference proceedings and a virtual version of the exhibition may be accessed through the website of the New Bedford Historical Society (https://nbhistoricalsociety.org/).

In 2020, Walker was appointed by the Governor of Massachusetts to serve on the Advisory Board of the official Tall Ship of Massachusetts, the schooner Ernestina/Morrissey, where he is the chair of the Educational Programming Committee.

Selected publications:

• Editor and Coordinator: Sailing to Freedom: Maritime Dimensions of the Underground Railroad (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2021).

• Co-editor and Coordinator: Essays on Some Maladies of Angola (with Adelino Cardoso, António Braz de Oliveira and Manuel Marques, co-eds.) (Tagus Press & University Press of New England, 2016).

• “Slave Labor and Chocolate in Brazil: The Culture of Cacao Plantations in Amazonia and Bahia (17th-19th Centuries),” in Food and Foodways, Carole Counihan and Allen Grieco, eds. (June 2007).

• “Slaves or Soldiers? African Conscripts in Portuguese India, 1857-1860,” in Slavery in the Indian Ocean Region, Richard Eaton and Indrani Chatterjee, editors (Indiana University Press, 2006).

• “Abolishing the Slave Trade in Portuguese India: Documentary Evidence of Popular and Official Resistance to Crown Policy, 1842-1860,” in Slavery and Abolition, 25:2 (London 2004).

• “Slaves, Free Blacks and the Inquisition in Early Modern Portugal: Race as a Factor in Magical Crimes Trials,” in Bulletin of the Society for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies, 25:2, 2000.

Professor emeritus Patrick Bellegarde-Smith received his doctorate in international relations, comparative politics, and Latin American Studies, in 1977. He taught in the field of international development, political economy, and culture, at Bradley University, then later, at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, in the field of African-American Studies with a focus on Caribbean cultures, politics and history, Afro-Caribbean religions, and in the area of Black feminisms. He is the author or editor of five books, among them, In the Shadow of Powers (Humanities Press International, 1985, 2nd ed. Vanderbilt University Press, 2019), The Breached Citadel (Westview Press, 1990, 2nd ed. Canadian Scholars Press, 2004), and Fragments of Bone: Neo-African Religions in a New World, ed. (Illinois University Press, 2005). A sixth book on gender identities and African religious systems is in preparation. Some of his writings have been anthologized, notably, “Hormones and Melanin: The Dimensions of ‘Race,’ Sex and Gender: Reflexive Journeys,” in Jacqueline Bobo et al., The Black Studies Reader (New York: Routledge, 2004).

For his work on issues of ethnic, racial, and national identities, he received from the State University of Haiti, the Jean Price-Mars Medal in 2013, and the Lifetime Achievement Award for Scholarship from the Haitian Studies Association in 2010. Some of his books and articles have been translated into French, Spanish, Kreyol (Haitian), and Portuguese.

Bellegarde-Smith served as the President of the Congress of Santa Barbara (KOSANBA), a scholarly association for the study of Vodou and other African-derived religions, and is a former president of the Haitian Studies Association, (HSA). He is an associate editor for the Journal of Haitian Studies, and served on the editorial boards of Kalfou: A Journal of Comparative and Relational Ethnic Studies, and the Journal of Africana Religions.

He is an oungan asogwe, a priest of Haitian Vodou. He attended The University of the Virgin Islands, the “youngest” HBCU, Syracuse University at Utica College, and The American University, School of International Service.

Dr. Akua Benjamin is a longstanding activist, academic and Black-Canadian community leader. Akua’s involvement in community activism began in the 1970s, when she became actively involved in numerous community groups, organizations and initiatives advocating for change and challenging racist and discriminatory structures, policies, and practices in Canada. The groups in which she has played a leadership role include: Black Action Defense Committee (BADC), Congress of Black Women, and the Coalition of Visible Minority Women.

Fassil Demissie currently serves as Editor for the African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal (Routledge) and Series Editor for Routledge Studies on African and Black Diaspora. He is Professor Emeritus, DePaul University, Chicago. Dr. Demissie is the author of several books, articles, and monographs. Most recently published Ethiopians in Migration’s Age: Scattered Lives Beyond Borders (Routledge, 2017).

Sylvia D. Hamilton is a Nova Scotian filmmaker, writer, multi-media artist known for her award-winning documentary films and her publications, presentations, and extensive volunteer work with artistic, social, and cultural organizations at the local and national levels. Her films include Black Mother Black Daughter, Speak It! From the Heart of Black Nova Scotia, Portia White: Think on Me, and The Little Black School House; they have been broadcast in Canada and screened at national and international festivals.

Her 2014 poetry collection, And I Alone Escaped to Tell You, was a finalist for several awards. Excavation: A Site of Memory, a multi-media installation, has been shown in galleries and museums in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Ontario and Quebec. One adaptation titled Here We Are Here, gave its name to the 2018 Royal Ontario Museum’s (ROM) national group exhibition titled, Here We Are Here: Black Canadian Contemporary Art.

Her recognitions include several honorary degrees, a Gemini Award, and the 2019 Governor General’s Award in History (Popular Media). She has a B.A. from Acadia University and an M.A. from Dalhousie University. She held Nancy’s Chair in Women’s Studies at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax and has taught and given lectures at many universities in Canada, and at Middlebury College in Vermont, and the University of the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica. After her retirement from the University of King’s College in 2020, where she held the Rogers Chair in Communications in the School of Journalism, King’s named her an Inglis Professor and launched five annual awards in her name for African Canadian students.

Sandra Jackson currently serves as Editor of African and Black Diaspora: An international Journal as well as Series Editor of Routledge Studies on Africa and Black Diaspora, published by Routledge Taylor Francis. She is Professor Emeritus, DePaul University, Chicago. Dr. Jackson is the author of several edited books and author of several articles regarding Women’s and Gender Studies, Higher Education, as well as speculative and science fiction. She served as the Director of the Center for Black Diaspora at DePaul University.

Dr. Lynn Jones is a civil and human rights activist, educator, speaker and community historian. She was born and raised in Truro, Nova Scotia, and pursued her education and working career in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Jones was the first African Canadian to join the executive ranks of the Canadian Labour Congress. Her life-long community activism has focused on anti-racism, feminism, class, ability, poverty and environment.

Dr. Jones continues to work on the obtaining of Reparations for Afrikan People and highlighting the crimes that occurred during and post Transatlantic Slave Trade. She is a community archivist and creator of the Lynn Jones African Canadian & Diaspora Heritage Collection (LJACDHC) at Saint Mary’s University.

James W. St.G. (Jim) Walker is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Waterloo. His book The Black Loyalists: The Search for a Promised Land in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone (1976, 1992), was republished in a collection of 30 “iconic books that have shaped a nation” by the University of Toronto Press in 2017.

He has written many books and articles on African-Canadian history and the history of human rights, including A History of Blacks in Canada: A Study Guide for Teachers and Students (1979), ‘Race,’ Rights and the Law in the Supreme Court of Canada (1997), and Burnley ‘Rocky’ Jones: Revolutionary (2016), co-authored with Rocky Jones. With Rocky, he co-founded the Transition Year Program at Dalhousie University in 1970. He is a Member of the Order of Canada, Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, a former Bora Laskin National Fellow in Human Rights Research, and recipient of the Olivier LeJeune “Trailblazer” award from the Ontario Black History Society.

Deborah Willis, Ph.D., is University Professor and Chair of the Department of Photography & Imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University and has an affiliated appointment with the College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Social & Cultural Analysis, Africana Studies, where she teaches courses on Photography & Imaging, iconicity, and cultural histories visualizing the black body, women, and gender. Dr. Willis is also the Director for the Center for Black Visual Culture.

She received the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. Willis is the author of The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship, Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present; and co-author of Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery. Professor Willis’s curated exhibitions include: “Let Your Motto Be Resistance: African American Portraits” at the International Center of Photography and “Reframing Beauty: Intimate Moments” at Indiana University.

Since 2006 she has co-organized thematic conferences exploring imaging the black body in the West such as the conference titled Black Portraiture[s] which was held in Johannesburg, Paris, Florence, Cambridge and New York.

Robin Bernstein is a cultural historian who studies U.S. racial formation from the nineteenth century to the present. Her first book, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights, won five awards. A graduate of Yale’s doctoral program in American Studies and an elected member of the American Antiquarian, Bernstein is the Dillon Professor of American History and Professor of African and African American Studies and of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University. She is currently writing a book, The Trials of William Freeman: A Story of Race, Murder, and America’s First Industrial Prison (under contract, University of Chicago Press).

Dr. Claudine Bonner is a scholar of African Diaspora history and education, and a member of the Sociology Department and Women’s and Gender Studies Program at Acadia University. Her research is grounded in history, and broadly applied in analyses of race, gender, education, and identity in contemporary Canada. Her scholarship bridges the gap between studies of the Black Canadian experience and the broader African Diaspora, and crosses generational boundaries through innovative oral histories, community-based research, and published collaborative research with leading Canadian scholars.

Jenny Burman is Associate Professor of communication studies in the Department of Art History and Communications at McGill University. Her teaching, research, and publications are in the areas of transnational cultural studies, technologies of white supremacy, and urban space and racial violence.

Trevor Burnard is Wilberforce Professor of Slavery and Emancipation at the University of Hull and Director of the Wilberforce Institute. He is the author of 15 books, including 8 monographs and 3 edited books; 46 articles and 45 book chapters; and is the editor-in-chief of the Oxford Online Bibliography in Atlantic History. Among his principal publications are Jamaica in the Age of Revolution (2020); The Plantation Machine: Atlantic Capitalism in French Saint Domingue and British Jamaica (2016); Planters, Merchants, and Slaves: Plantation Societies in British America, 1650-1820 (2015); Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World (2004); and Creole Gentlemen: Wealthy Marylanders, 1691-1776 (2002).

Mathias Danbolt is an art historian with a special focus on queer, anti-racist, and decolonial perspectives on art and visual culture. His research on the intersection of Nordic colonial histories and art histories in the Caribbean has been presented in numerous publications as well as the co-curated research exhibition Blind Spots: Images of the Danish West Indies Colony (Royal Danish Library, 2017-18). He is currently directing the collective research project “The Art of Nordic Colonialism: Writing Transcultural Art Histories” (2019-2022), supported by Carlsberg Foundation, which examines the effects and affects of Nordic colonialism within the field of art and museology.

Andrea Fatona is an independent curator and an associate professor at the Ontario College of Art and Design University. She is concerned with issues of equity within the sphere of the arts and the pedagogical possibilities of art works produced by ‘other’ Canadians in articulating broader perspectives of Canadian identities. Her broader interest is in the ways in which art, ‘culture’ and ‘education’ can be employed by to illuminate complex issues that pertain to social justice, citizenship, belonging, and nationhood. She is the recipient of awards from Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and was the 2017/18 OCAD U-Massey Fellow. Fatona is a Canada Research Chair Tier 2 in Canadian Black Diasporic Cultural Production. She has published scholarly articles, catalogue essays, and book chapters in a range of publications.

Jennifer Garland is the Assistant Head Librarian, Rare Books and Special Collections, at McGill University Library. She is curator of the Blackader Lauterman Collection of Architecture and Art and the John Bland Canadian Architecture Collection, and co-founder of the McGill Book Arts Laboratory. Born in Nova Scotia, Garland holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from NSCAD and a master’s degree in library studies from McGill University. She is an active member of the Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS/NA) and past member of the Executive Board (2016-18).

Chris is a queer, white-Settler of Scottish and Italian descent from Nanzuhzaugewazog, Dish with One Spoon, Head of the Lake Treaty no. 14 (1806), Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg territory. His SSHRC sponsored Doctoral research explores temperate slavery in settler-colonial Upper Canada and enslaved women’s resistances under gradual abolition through print culture and portrait representations.

Jennifer brings a fresh, authentic perspective to telling powerful, thought-provoking stories. She works in documentaries and dramatic film and TV production.

On the drama side, Jen creates, writes and produces television series. This includes Shoot The Messenger (CBC, WGN/USA) and Guns (CBC). Jen received a shared Best Writing Canadian Screen Award for Guns, alongside four additional CSAs, a Rose Dor international nomination for best Drama and that year’s ACTRA Best Actor award for KC Collins. Jen’s dramatic feature film credits includes, Home Again, that she cowrote with partner Sudz Sutherland and produced. The film sold to the US and internationally and screened theatrically in the UK, Africa and the Caribbean. It won the Planet Africa Film Fest–BAFTA Festival Choice Award and along with a DGC nod for Best Direction for Sutherland. The film was also nominated for two Canadian Screen Awards, including a best supporting nod for Stephan James (If Beale Street Could Talk) in his feature debut role.

She also wrote the story for and produced the triple Genie nominated feature, Love, Sex and Eating the Bones that also won 7 festival awards including the Best First Canadian Feature at the Toronto International Film Festival. The film was also nominated for 3 Genies for Best Writing, Directing and Picture.

Her short, My Father’s Hands, won the HBO Award for Best Short film, received 5 Golden Sheaf Awards, including Best – Drama, Director, Script, Music and Actor and received a Gemini nomination for Best Short Film.

On the doc side, Jen is a co-producer of the feature doc, Stateless, with director Michele Stephenson (American Promise) for PBS’s The America Series and the National Film Board. Stateless premiered digitally at Tribeca and at Hot Docs in 2020 where it won the festival’s Special Jury Prize. She is the Executive Producer of Maya Annik Bedward feature doc, Black Zombie, that is in production with CBC’s Doc Channel. Jen is directing her first feature doc, Subjects of Desire, about Black women and beauty. The documentary is in post-production for TVO and Crave in Canada.

She has also produced numerous TV documentaries, including; Badge of Pride (CBC & PBS) Min Sook Lee’s film about gay cops that has sold internationally from Israel to Europe. Brick By Brick (Omni), Yin Jade Love (TVO), and Dolores: The Art of Art Modeling (Bravo!). Speakers For The Dead (CBC/NFB), which she co-directed, reveals a hidden Black history in Ontario and she and co-director Sudz Sutherland were invited to Harvard University to present a talk about the film and Canadian Black history.

Jen has two dramatic feature film projects on her slate, including the German Canadian co-pro RipTide that she co-wrote. The film will star Malin Ackerman and Lyriq Bent and is being distributed by Mongrel Media. She is also producing 40 Acres, R.T Thorne’s debut feature film that is slated for production in 2022.

Along with her creative work, Jennifer is a dedicated advocate for diversity and mentorship. She is a founding member of the Black Screen Office. She has mentored/hired scores of African Canadians and diverse youth over the past decade and a half, both personally and through organizations like The Reel World Film Festival, Black Women Film!, Through Their Eyes, The Toronto Black Film Festival and the Montreal Black Film Festival. Her Board work includes, Canadian Media Producer’s Association, Canadian Independent Screen Fund (co-chair) Ontario Creates Industry Board (co-chair), The Regent Park Film Festival, Women In View, Innoversity Creative Summit and CMPA’s Prime Time.

Ingeborg received her PhD from the University of Edinburgh and is Associate Professor of Art History at UiT the Arctic University of Norway. Between 2014 and 2017 she was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Women’s and Gender Research, UiT. She has been a Caird Short-term Research Fellow at the National Maritime Museum, London (2008), a guest researcher at Linnaeus University Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies (2015), and a visiting researcher at Greenland National Museum and Archives (2015, 2019). Ingeborg’s research is rooted in postcolonial studies and cultural representations of the Arctic, and her latest publication is ‘Girlhood in the Arctic: Word-Image Relations in R. M. Ballantyne’s Canadian Adventures’, in The Arctic in Literature for Children and Young Adults (Hanson et al. Routledge, 2020). In the period 2020 to 2024, she is the manager of Arctic Voices in Art and Literature in the Long 19th Century, an international research project funded by the Research Council of Norway.

At heart, Andrew’s work is multi-disciplinary and exploratory, incorporating visual art, writing, performance and media, as well as academic and archival research and story-telling. Acknowledging his status as a settler, he is committed to collaboratively developing and sharing new approaches that break from colonial models and embrace the need for the genuine critical decentering of whiteness.

In addition, the mental health of individuals, communities and cultures is of fundamental importance to his life and work. Hunter has significant knowledge of local histories, cultures, social geography, geology and natural history. A former house painter, steeplejack, caretaker, marina and factory labourer, Hunter’s grandparents came to Hamilton in the 1920s from Birmingham/Norwich, England, and Glasgow, Scotland, as working people; his parents were Hamilton born and worked in industry and health care.

A graduate of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Hunter has, over a 30-year career, worked nationally and internationally. He has held senior curatorial positions across Canada (including at the Vancouver Art Gallery and Art Gallery of Ontario) and has produced exhibitions and publications for such institutions as the National Gallery of Canada, Winnipeg Art Gallery, the Banff Centre for the Arts, Concordia University, University of Toronto, Museum of Modern Art Dubrovnik (Croatia), Hammer Museum at UCLA, and Museum of Fine Arts Boston, among many others.

A co-founder of the creative research project DodoLab (with Lisa Hirmer), Hunter has also been a regular collaborator with the community focussed arts research initiative proboscis (London, UK). He has taught graduate and undergraduate level courses at University of Waterloo/Waterloo Architecture and OCAD University and has worked closely with organizations supporting at-risk youth. Hunter regularly writes and speaks about institutions of culture and history, the erasure of histories, the marginalization of cultures by colonial institutions, and the responsibilities and accountabilities of settler communities and whiteness, most recently at Harvard University, University of Glasgow and McGill University, and in the keynote talks at the 2018 Archives Association of Ontario Conference at Laurier University and the 2018 Saskatchewan Artists Association Conference at University of Saskatchewan. He has received numerous grants and awards.

Andrew Hunter’s latest book is It Was Dark There All the Time: Sophia Burthen and the Legacy of Slavery in Canada (Goose Lane Editions, 2022).

Elis Ing is a librarian with experience working in special collections and education, with a particular interest in multimedia and heritage collections. She currently serves as a Search Editor for Getty Images. Previously, she was liaison librarian within the Rare Books and Special Collections unit of the McGill University Library.

Alice Ming Wai Jim is Professor of Contemporary Art History and Concordia University Research Chair in Ethnocultural Art Histories at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. She is co-editor-in-chief of the journal Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, published by Brill, in association with The Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art, Concordia University, and Asian/Pacific/American Institute, New York University. An art historian and curator, her research on diasporic art in Canada and contemporary Asian art has generated new dialogues within and between ethnocultural and global art histories, critical race theory, media arts, and curatorial studies. Her current research examines the convergence of Indigenous and Afro-Asian futurism in contemporary art. Jim is a member of the College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists of the Royal Society of Canada (RSC).

Adam Harris Levine holds degrees from McGill University, the Courtauld Institute of Art, and Columbia University. Since 2020, Adam has served as Assistant Curator at the Art Gallery of Ontario’s department of European Art, where he examines the roles that colonization and enslavement played in the economies and visual cultures of European imperial powers.

Professor Merrill’s research and publications are in the fields of performance studies, critical race and cultural studies, and women’s history. She applies her work on performance, spectatorship, and visuality to a range of cultural artifacts, artworks, and performances. Her critical biography, When Romeo was a Woman: Charlotte Cushman and her Circle of Female Spectators (U of Michigan Press, 2000) was awarded the Joe A. Callaway Prize and featured an exploration of an expatriate community of women artists.

In 2002 Professor Merrill was awarded the National Endowment for the Humanities senior faculty research fellowship, in 2005 a Visiting Fellowship, Institute for Advanced Study, La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia, and in 2010-2011 Professor Merrill was awarded the Eccles Centre Visiting Professorship in North American Studies at the British Library for “Performing Race and Reading Antebellum American Bodies.” In further recognition for her work on race and representation, in 2016 Professor Merrill was awarded the Oscar Brockett Essay Prize for her essay “Most Fitting Companions: Making Mixed Race Bodies Visible in Antebellum Public Spaces,” Theatre Survey: Special Issue on Racial Hybridity, May 2015.

Professor Merrill has published widely in the US and UK. Her talks on nineteenth-century representations and performances of race in Britain were sponsored, in part by the Institute for Black Atlantic Research, UCLAN, England, where she was Visiting Scholar 2016 and is again in Spring 2021. Most recently in the UK she has published “Amalgamation, Moral Geography and Slum Tourism’: Irish and African Americans Sharing Space on the Streets and Stages of Antebellum NY,” in Fionnhuala Sweeney, et al, eds. Ireland, Slavery, Anti-Slavery and Empire, Routledge, 2018.

Professor Merrill has delivered invited lectures on “Spectacularizing Black Bodies on 19th Century Stages,” for the International Museum for the Study of Slavery, Liverpool, England, June 2017, and a keynote “Sounding Antislavery Voices in Antebellum Spaces,” for the Revisiting the Black Atlantic Conference: Gender, Race, and Performance, University of Liverpool, June 2019. Currently Prof. Merrill’s work on Turner Prize-winning artist Lubaina Himid’s “Memorial to Zong” is part of an exhibition at Lancaster Maritime Museum, and Professor Merrill is a contributor to the Tate Catalogue for Lubaina Himid’s upcoming one-woman show at Tate Modern, London, November 2021.

Aly Ndiaye, aka Webster, is a veteran of the Quebec hip-hop scene. Active since 1995, he now travels the world through his concerts, writing workshops and lectures. Passionate about history, the rapper from Limoilou is particularly interested in slavery and the presence of people of African descent in Quebec and Canada since the time of New France.

Webster is the author of a hip-hop writing manual, Àl’Ombredes Feuilles (Québec Amérique, 2019), and a children’s book about Olivier Le Jeune, the first African slave in Canada, Le Grain de Sable (Septentrion, 2019). In 2019, he was the curator of the Fugitives! exhibition at the Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Québec about resistance to slavery through flight. He also has put together Qc History X tours, guided tours of the Old Quebec about slavery and the presence of people of African descent.

Temi Odumosu is an art historian, curator, and assistant professor at the University of Washington Information School in Seattle. She is author of the award-winning book Africans in English Caricature 1769-1819: Black Jokes White Humour (2017). Her research interests include colonial visual cultures, archival praxis, post-memorial art and performance, and ethics-of-care in representation. Overall, she is focused on the multitude ways art can mediate social transformation and healing. She is currently a member of the research network The Art of Nordic Colonialism: Writing Transcultural Art Histories.

Sirpa Salenius, with Ph.D. and Habilitation à diriger des recherches (HDR) in Transatlantic Studies, has taught at the University of Tokyo (Japan) and more recently at the University of Eastern Finland (Joensuu, Finland), where her courses on American Studies placed an emphasis on Black American literature and culture. She is an External Affiliate at the University College London Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation.

Her research interests include race, gender, sexuality, and space studies. Among her most recent publications are An Abolitionist Abroad: Sarah Parker Remond in Cosmopolitan Europe (University of Massachusetts Press, 2016) and an essay collection, Race and Transatlantic Identities (Routledge, 2017), co-edited with Elizabeth T. Kenney and Whitney Womack Smith. She is the recipient of several fellowships and awards, including the 2020-2021 Terra Foundation for American Art Senior Fellow at Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.

Sudz Sutherland started writing stories that matter on his mother’s Smith-Corona in grade one, and he continues to fill blank pages on his iPad every day. Starting with music videos and award-winning short films, Sudz and his partner Jen Holness started Hungry Eyes Media, a production company that makes features, docs, drama and comedy series and the occasional Mobile Game.

Sudz’s powerful half-hour dramatic debut, My Father’s Hands screened at The Toronto International Film Festival. It won the $20,000 HBO Short Film Award at the Acapulco Black Film festival, and in Canada it went on to win prizes at the Yorkton Film Festival (four awards including best drama, script, direction and best actor). The film was also nominated for a Gemini Award for Best Short.

Sudz’ first feature was the TIFF award winning Love, Sex and Eating the Bones. His second feature was the internationally award-winning Home Again, the story of Jamaican deportees. Sudz also co-wrote and directed the dramatic miniseries Guns for CBC based on four families caught up in illegal gun trafficking. Starring Colm Feore and Elisha Cuthbert, Guns won five Gemini Awards including Best writer and Directing. Sudz also wrote and directed the triple Gemini award-winning (Best Direction, Best Supporting Actress, Best Television Movie) Doomstown, an MOW for CTV/Sarrazin Couture.

Sudz has directed over 75 hours of television on shows as diverse as Netflix’s Ginny and Georgia, Superman and Lois, Batwoman, The Flash, Blindspot, Netflix’s Designated Survivor, CW’s Reign, Murdoch Mysteries, and many others. He’s won an International Emmy (The Phantoms) and 3 CSA’s for Best Director. He also co-created the series She’s the Mayor (VisionTV) and Shoot the Messenger and Guns (CBC).

Camille Turner is an artist/scholar whose work combines Afrofuturism and historical research. Her most recent explorations confront the entanglement of what is now Canada in the transatlantic trade in Africans. She puts into practice Afronautics, a methodological frame she developed to approach colonial archives from the point of view of a liberated future. Camille is a graduate of OCAD and has recently completed a PhD at York University’s Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change. Currently, she is a Provost’s postdoctoral fellow at University of Toronto’s Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design. Turner is the recipient of the 2022 Artist Prize by the Toronto Biennial of Art awarded for her outstanding contributions to the event. Her artworks are held in museums and public and private collections, including: National Gallery of Canada, Art Gallery of Hamilton, Royal Bank of Canada, Art Museum at University of Toronto, Museum London, Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, The Wedge Collection and The Rooms.

Bruno R. Véras is a public-digital historian and cultural producer whose work focuses on African History, Global African diasporas, historical slavery and art-education. He has directed awarded-winning educational projects in the Global South. He is the director of the art-focused initiative Fragments of Memory. His engagement as a coordinator and associate director for the SHADD_hub (directed by Paul Lovejoy) at the Harriet Tubman Institute, York University (2015-2021) resulted in the creation and/or development of several digital initiatives such as Equiano’s World, IPTSA, Freedom Narratives and DATAS Project.

He coordinated in a British Library Endangered Archives project (Sierra Leone Public Archives) and has played an important role in the training and development of workshops related to African studies and Digital Humanities for the CSiW project network (directed by Professor Annie Bunting). His work as a UNESCO consultant for Africa-Brazilian History has helped in the planning and development of exhibitions for museums and other gallery spaces around the world. He continues to work and to support, as a historical consultant and executive producer, in multi-disciplinary art-based projects, audiovisual and television series in Brazil, Uganda, South Africa, Nigeria, Canada, and Egypt. He has previously served as a board member for CERLAC, Harriet Tuman Institute and GEPHADA.

Harvey Amani Whitfield (Amani) is the Professor of Black North American History at the University of Calgary. His research area is transnational African American history in the wider context of the African Diaspora and Black Atlantic. This research focus has resulted in the publication of six books including two university press monographs, Blacks on the Border: The Black Refugees in British North America, 1815-1860 and North to Bondage: Loyalist Slavery in the Maritimes.

His most recent publication is Biographical Dictionary of Enslaved Black People in the Maritimes (‎University of Toronto Press, 2022), that includes approximately 1450 individuals. Whitfield is grateful to the Institute for the Study of Canadian Slavery for including him as a member of the Advisory Board.

Marcus Wood is a painter, performance artist and film-maker. Since 2003 he has also been Professor of English and Diaspora Studies at the University of Sussex.

​For the last thirty years Marcus has been making art and writing books about different ways in which the traumatic memory of slavery and colonization have been encoded in art and literature. His books include Blind Memory Slavery and Visual Representation in England and America (Manchester University Press and Routledge New York, 2000); High Tar Babies – Race, Hatred, Slavery Love (Clinamen Press, 2001;) Slavery, Empathy and Pornography (Oxford University Press, 2003); The Horrible Gift of Freedom Atlantic Slavery and the Representation of Emancipation (University of Georgia Press, 2010) and Black Milk: Imagining Slavery in the Visual Cultures of Brazil and America.

​Marcus’s latest book is The Black Butterfly: Slavery and Memory in Brazilian Literature (University of Virginia Press October 2019) focuses on the slavery writings of three of Brazil’s literary giants—Machado de Assis, Castro Alves, and Euclides da Cunha. Marcus is also currently working on a big project Exploding Archives: Meditations on Slavery, Brazil, America and the limits of cultural memory. The project will result in a monograph, various performances and installations and a film.

Dr. Rachel Zellars, MA, JD, PhD, is a lawyer and Assistant Professor at Saint Mary’s University in the Department of Social Justice and Community Studies. Her research and scholarship focus on the history of Black Canada beginning with the American Revolution; slavery in the Maritimes and the lives of enslaved women; and gender violence and transformative justice.

She is also a nationally recognized expert on critical implicit bias, a framework and approach that she coined in conjunction with her extensive, ongoing work with the federal government and numerous private institutions. In addition to her legal background, Dr. Zellars also holds a master’s degree in Africana Studies from Cornell University and a doctorate in education from McGill University. She is a long-time community organizer who co-founded the Black Lives Matter Solidarity Fund in Nova Scotia, which has raised over $300,000 to date.

Additionally, she co-founded the African Nova Scotian Freedom School to honor the rich legacies of African Nova Scotian freedom fighters, educators, and community leaders throughout the province.

Simone Cambridge is Bahamian art writer, researcher, and curator examining transatlantic slavery, diasporic identity, postcolonialism, and race in visual culture and curatorial theory. She holds a Bachelor of Arts from McGill University in Art History and International Development Studies with a minor in Urban Systems Geography and is currently completing a MA fellowship at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research has been published by the McGill University Department of Art History and Communications, Journal of Black Canadian Studies, and Hyperallergic. Her article, “ ‘It has just begun’: Strawcraft in Bahamian Visual Culture,” was recently published in RACAR’s salt. For the preservation of Black diasporic visual histories.

Roxanne Cornellier completed her Bachelor of Arts at McGill University where she double majored in Art History and Latin American and Caribbean Studies. At McGill, Cornellier was part of the team led by Charmaine A. Nelson to research and document James McGill’s connections to slavery and to publish the Bicentenary Recommendations.

For her Master of Arts thesis at Concordia University in Montreal, she is examining the Young Men Hebrew Association Minstrels’ archives and reflects on the role and influence of the visual culture of blackface minstrelsy on the construction of whiteness in Montreal in the early twentieth century. She is also a recipient of the Renata Hornstein Graduate Fellowship in Art History. Cornellier spent her summer 2023 at The Center for Studying Structures of Race in the Maurice Berger Memorial Archive and Library, working under the supervision of Dr. Jesse Bucher to create overviews for the Racist & Stereotypical and Black History collections.

Jane O’Brien Davis is a recent graduate of Master of Science in Planning from the University of Toronto, where she researched public memory in the decolonial city. Her interests lie in heritage planning, cultural planning, and insurgent planning practices. Jane holds a Bachelor of Arts from McGill University in Urban Studies and Art History, where she was able to focus her studies on the aesthetics of the built environment, understanding the layered impact they have.

Jane is the recipient of the Canadian Institute of Planners’ Outstanding Graduate Student Award, as well as the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council’s Canada Graduate scholarship and the Government of Ontario’s Ontario Graduate Scholarship.

Emily Draicchio is a recent graduate of Master of Arts in History from University of New Brunswick. She holds a Bachelor of Arts, Joint Honors in Art History and Anthropology with a specialization in Archaeology from McGill University. During her time at McGill, Emily’s research in Art History was centered on an analysis of anti-Black stereotypes in Canadian and Danish dolls from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She focused on their relation to the trauma experienced by the free and enslaved Black women who encountered them, while simultaneously analyzing the dolls as evidence to subvert Canadian and Danish national narratives of exceptionalism that have strategically ignored their participation in the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Outside of art history, Emily has developed a passion for archaeology while interning in India where she completed archaeological fieldwork and her Anthropology thesis on an analysis of botanical illustrations made by Indian artists.

Emily’s current MA project titled Excavating Archives: Searching for Sites of Black Enslavement in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Canada aims to bridge her interests in archaeology and history with Canadian slavery studies to dismantle a piece of the myth of Canada as inclusive, racism-free, and without a colonial history by locating, documenting, and analysing sites of Black enslavement in Québec and New Brunswick (c.1700s-1800s). She will approach her research through the examination of archival materials, oral and ethnographic sources generated by African Diasporic communities, and by completing interviews, reconnaissance surveys, and GIS site mapping. Her research is funded by the Canada Graduate Scholarships-Master’s Program (CGS M) under the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and Bourse de maîtrise en recherche (B1Z) issued by the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture (FRQSC).

Ellie Finkelstein is from Toronto, Canada, moved to Montreal to attend McGill University where she studied under Charmaine A. Nelson and dedicated much of her academic pursuits to the visual culture of transatlantic slavery. After obtaining her Bachelor of Arts, Ellie moved to the United Kingdom to complete a Master of Arts in Postcolonial Culture and Global Policy at Goldsmiths University of London. Inspired by her time learning about transatlantic slavery, Ellie wanted to understand how legacies of slavery are present in modern day society. Her dissertation explored Canada’s resistance to decriminalising sex work and how overrepresentation of Indigenous women in the industry is a manifestation of settler colonialism. Currently, Ellie works as a campaigner for Freedom United, an anti-modern slavery organisation where she mobilises digital campaigns and writes articles to spread awareness and inspire action against modern day slavery. The campaigns she works on deal with exploitative global supply chains, forced labour, human trafficking, and the prison industrial complex. As a part of the advisory board of Slavery North, Ellie continues fostering community, awareness, action, and opportunities to critically engage and address legacies of colonialism, history of transatlantic slavery, and the permeation of slavery in our societies today.

Denisa Marginean is a graduate student and teaching assistant in fashion studies based in Toronto. After completing her Bachelor of Arts in Art History at McGill University, her passion for topics such as anti-capitalism, social justice and art theory pursed at a Master of Arts at Toronto Metropolitan University. Marginean is currently researching anti-fashion as an aesthetic phenomenon and political identity embedded in post-modern capitalism. She is increasingly concerned with challenging white supremacist academic writing and knowledge production and understanding how research can live beyond academia.

Colin McCrossan is a law student at Temple University. He recently graduated with a Master of Arts in History from Villanova University, where he studied the history of slavery in the Philadelphia Area and worked for Villanova’s institutional history project, The Rooted Project. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in History from McGill University.  His other research interests include the history of abortion, contraception, and LGBTQ history. With his academic and legal training, McCrossan hopes to work in public policy and politics.

Nicholas Raffoul is an emerging writer, researcher, and artist based in Tiohtià:ke (Montreal). He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Art History from McGill University. At McGill, Nicholas was the editor-in-chief of CANVAS, the undergraduate journal of Art History and Communications. Nicholas is completing a Master of Arts in Art History at Concordia University, looking into the connection between archaeological imagination, material objects, and memory practices around the Lebanese Civil Wars (1975-1990) in the earlier films of Akram Zaatari. He is currently on the research team for the SSHRC-funded research project “Afrofuturism—Black Lives Matter” supervised by Dr. Alice Ming Wai Jim which surveys the history of Afrofuturism in the Canadian art scene within the last decade through an oral history approach.