Anna Arabindan-Kesson
Advisor

Professor Anna Arabindan-Kesson (Ph.D., Yale University, 2014) is an assistant professor of African American and Black Diasporic art with a joint appointment in the Department of African American Studies. She specializes in African American, Caribbean, and British Art, with an emphasis on histories of race, empire, and transatlantic visual culture in the long 19th century. An international upbringing and interdisciplinary training—in the fields of African American studies and art history—have shaped her intellectual formation. Consequently her research focuses on processes of cultural exchange and geographical movement, underpinned by histories of colonialism, and the legacies of these encounters in contemporary art practice. Drawing on the transnational, even global, perspective that African American Studies provides, her scholarship lies in conceptualizing the ways Black Diasporic art compels us to rethink constructions of national identity, racial formation, and cultural production.

These interests are explored more fully in her current book project, The Currency of Cotton: Art, Empire and Commerce 1780–1900.

As a curator she has been involved in several exhibitions, including the 2009 traveling exhibition Embodied: Black Identities in American Art from the Yale University Art Gallery, and Undisciplined Pleasures, Vigilant Defiance, a solo by Sarah K. Khan at 12Gates.