Nottingham Contemporary

The Study Sessions are informal reading and discussing groups. This season's sessions will touch upon subjects explored in our exhibition Glenn Ligon: Encounters and Collisions.

Led by Celeste-Marie Bernier, Sharon Monteith and Richard King (Department of American and Canadian Studies, University of Nottingham), these four sessions will unpack issues of representation, race and rights as told through text, photojournalism and African American art.

All sessions run 6.30-8.30pm

Thu May 7

Prof Celeste-Marie Bernier: African American Art and Influences

Celeste-Marie Bernier is a Professor of African American Studies at The University of Nottingham and is an associate editor of the Journal of American Studies (Cambridge University Press). Her research focuses on African American history and politics and literature and visual culture spanning from the Eighteenth-Century to present day. She is particularly interested in the way black authors and artists deal with issues around labour, history, slavery and identity in their work. She has explored this in her first book, African American Visual Arts: From Slavery to the Present (jointly published by The University of North Carolina and Edinburgh University Press in 2008) as well as later books such as “Characters of Blood:" Black Heroism in the Transatlantic Imagination (University of Virginia Press, 2012). Her forthcoming research projects, due in 2015 with the University of California Press, are the books Imaging Resistance: Representing the Body, Memory and History in Fifty Years of African American and Black British Visual Arts 1960-2010.

Thu May 14

Prof. Sharon Monteith: Civil Rights Photojournalism and Open Letters on Race and Rights

Sharon Monteith is a professor of American studies at the University of Nottingham and the Director of the AHRC-funded Midland3Cities Doctoral Training Partnership. Her research works across history, literature, media, film, and cultural studies with particular focus on the American South and the Civil rights movement. Her books include Advancing Sisterhood?: Interracial Friendships in Southern Fiction (University of Georgia Press, 2000) which explores relationships between black and white women across a selection of white female American literature, and American culture in the 1960s(Edinburgh University Press, 2008) which charts the changing face of major forms of American culture throughout the Twentieth-Century. She has also edited the book The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American South (2013) and The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture: Media (2011) with Allison Graham. Monteith is currently working on completing SNCC’sStories: Narrative Culture and the Southern Freedom Struggle of the 1960s for the University of Georgia Press. She was awarded the Rockefeller Humanities Fellowship at the University of Memphis in 2001.

Thu May 28

Prof. Sharon Monteith: Text Paintings and Speech Acts: Literary Encounters

Thu June 11

Prof Richard King: Representation and Abstraction: Politics and the Body

Richard King is emeritus professor in the department of American and Canadian Studies at The University of Nottingham. His research is concerned with American culture and politics, and race relations including black/white ethnic issues. He has authored influential books on the subject such as, Civil Rights and the Idea of Freedom (University of Georgia Press, 1996) and Race, Culture and the Intellectuals, 1940-1970 (John Hopkins University Press, 2004).