Beniba Centre for Slavery Studies | Ionad Bheniba airson Eòlas na Tràillealachd

Annual James McCune Smith Lecture

The Black Modernist Muse in Interwar London

Dr Rochelle Rowe, University of Edinburgh

Tuesday 12 November 2024, 6.30pm followed by drinks
Kelvin Hall Lecture Theatre

Places are free but limited and registration is required.
All are welcome!

For the annual James McCune Smith lecture, the Beniba Centre for Slavery Studies is proud to welcome Dr Rochelle Rowe. Dr Rowe shares from her research into the Black women art models who worked with famous British sculptor Jacob Epstein, but whose lives have been erased from the historical record, until now. An illuminating discussion centred on some forgotten figures of interwar Black London.

Dr Rochelle Rowe is a historian focused on the cultural history of race, gender and the body. She lectures in Black British History at the University of Edinburgh. Her first book is Imagining Caribbean Womanhood: race, nation and beauty competitions and tells a Black Feminist history of beauty spanning the Caribbean, Harlem and London and is published in paperback by Manchester University Press. Rochelle's current research falls into roughly three interwoven area: she explores the lives and labours of Black art models in nineteenth and early twentieth century Britain; race, gender and identity in the Black British Press, and has recently won a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council to examine the histories of performative Blackness in connection with Black Histories in Scotland between 1839 and 1939. Rochelle's award-winning teaching focuses on Black Atlantic Histories, including courses on Carnival in the Atlantic World, Representations of Blackness in Britain and Europe, Black Activism in Britain since 1800 and Black Feminist Thought. 

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First published: 10 October 2024