Charmaine Andrea Nelson is a Canadian art historian, educator, author, and independent curator. Nelson has been a Professor of Art History in the Department of Art History and Communications Studies at McGill University since 2003 and is the first tenured Black professor of art history in Canada. Nelson's research interests include the visual culture of slavery, race and representation, Black Canadian studies and African Canadian history as well as critical theory, post-colonial studies, Black feminist scholarship, Transatlantic Slavery Studies, and Black Diaspora Studies. In addition to teaching and publishing in these research areas, Nelson has curated exhibitions, including at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa, Ontario, and the Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec.
After completing her BFA and MFA degrees at Concordia University, Nelson worked at the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa, Ontario. She then began her PhD at Queen's University which she completed at the University of Manchester in 2001. Before obtaining her current position at McGill University, Nelson was an assistant professor at University of Western Ontario. Throughout her career, Nelson has held several fellowships and research chairs including a Caird Senior Research Fellowship, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, UK, a Fulbright Visiting Research Chair, University of California – Santa Barbara as well as a visiting professorship in the Department of Africology at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. In 2015, she was an Associate Member of the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art at Concordia University. From 2015 to 2017, Nelson was a Faculty Fellow at McGill's Institute for Public Life of the Arts and Ideas. In 2016, she was named as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, College of New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists. From 2017 to 2018, Nelson was the William Lyon Mackenzie King Visiting Professor of Canadian Studies at Harvard University. In June 2020, Nelson was named as NSCAD University's Tier 1 Canada Research Chair, a funded, seven-year position where she will continue her research on Transatlantic Black Diasporic Art and Community Engagement. In addition, Nelson will use the seven-year position to work with NSCAD to develop the Institute for the Study of Canadian Slavery.
Public Speaking
Nelson regularly offers public presentations of her research. Some of these include:
McCready Lecture on Canadian Art at the Art Gallery of Ontario, "From African to Creole: Examining Creolization through the Art and Fugitive Slave Advertisements of Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Canada and Jamaica".
Walker Cultural Leader Series and Canada 150 at Brock University, "Colonial Print Culture and the Limits of Enslaved Resistance: Examining the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth-Century Fugitive Slave Archive in Canada and Jamaica" .
Slavery and human rights: struggles of representation Lectures presented by Réseau art actuel, "Mining a Colonial Archive: Fugitive Slave Advertisements – An Untapped Resource in the Study of Slavery in Canada".
Lecture at University of Toronto Scarborough, "Slavery, Race & Representation: Charmaine A. Nelson and Andrew Hunter in Conversation" wherein Nelson discussed her "research on fugitive slaves in Canada and its role in understanding the experiences of Black communities in 18th and 19th centuries in the regions that became Canada".
Lecture at the National Gallery of Canada, "Fugitive Slave Advertisements and/as Portraiture in late Eighteenth- and early Nineteenth-Century Canada".
J. Fred Weintz & Rosemary Weintz Art Lecture Series at Stanford University's Department of Art & Art History, "Weintz Art Lecture Series presents Charmaine Nelson".
Select Publications
Nelson has published articles in academic journals and popular sources, including the Journal of Transatlantic Studies, The Walrus Magazine, Frieze, RACAR: revue d'art canadienne / Canadian Art Review, American Art, Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, and HuffPost. She is author and editor of several books and has contributed chapters to numerous scholarly publications.
As author
Through an-other's eyes: white Canadian artists, Black female subjects.
The Color of Stone: Sculpting the Black Female Subject in Nineteenth-Century America.
Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art.
Slavery, Geography, and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Marine Landscapes of Montreal and Jamaica.
As editor
Racism Eh?: A Critical Inter-Disciplinary Anthology of Race and Racism in Canada.
Ebony Roots, Northern Soil: Perspectives on Blackness in Canada.
Legacies Denied: Unearthing the Visual Culture of Canadian Slavery.
Towards an African-Canadian Art History: Art, Memory, and Resistance.
As contributing author
"Vénus africaine: race, beauty and African-ness," Black Victorians: black people in British art, 1800–1900, ed. Jan Marsh.
"Edmonia Lewis's Death of Cleopatra: White Marble, Black Bodies, and Racial Crisis in America," Local/Global: Women Artists in the Nineteenth-Century, eds. Deborah Cherry and Janice Helland.
"Speculations on the Visual: Culture, Race and Diaspora," Multiple Lenses: Voices from the Diaspora Located in Canada, ed. David Divine.
"Sugar Cane, Slaves, and Ships: Colonialism, Geography and Power in Nineteenth-Century Landscapes of Montreal and Jamaica," Living History: Encountering the Memory of the Heirs of Slavery, ed. Ana Lucia Araujo.
"Buried in a Watery Grave: Art, Commemoration and Racial Trauma," The Black Body: Imagining, Writing, and reading, eds. Michelle Goodwin, Sandra Jackson, Fassil Demisse.
"Blacks in White Marble: Interracial Female Subjects in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Neoclassicism," Blackberries and Redbones: Critical Articulations of Black Hair/Body Politics in Africana Communities, eds. Regina E. Spellers and Kimberly R. Moffitt,.
"The 'Hottentot Venus' in Canada: Modernism, Censorship and the Racial Limits of Female Sexuality," Queerly Canadian: An Introductory Reader in Sexuality Studies, eds. Maureen Fitzgerald and Scott Rayler.
Wanted.
"Servant, Savage or Sarah: Enslaved Black Female Subjects in Canadian Art and Fugitive Slave Advertisements," Women in the "Promised Land" essays in African Canadian history, eds. Wanda Bernard, Boulou Ebanda and Nina Reid-Maroney.
"Remembering Canadian Slavery. Black Subjects in Historical Quebec Art.," Engaging with diversity: multidisciplinary reflections on plurality from Québec, eds. Stephan Gervais, Mary Anne Poutanen and Raffaele Iacovino.
"Ran away from her master... a negroe girl named Thursday": examining evidence of punishment, isolation, and trauma in Nova Scotia and Quebec fugitive slave advertisements," Legal violence and the limits of the law, eds. Joshua Nichols and Amy Swiffen.
Recognition
Charmaine Nelson has received a Woman of Distinction Award from the Montreal's Women's YWCA in 2012 as well as a Teaching Award from The Arts Undergraduate Society of McGill University, and McGill's Faculty Award for Equity and Community Building.
