Celeste-Marie Bernier (NHC Fellow, 2016–17)

Fellowship Work Summary, 2016–17

Celeste-Marie Bernier completed her book Stick to the Skin: Representing the Body, Memory, and History in Fifty Years of African American and Black British Art (1965–2015) (University of California Press, 2017). She also researched and began work on three additional books, including the monograph Back into the Battleground: A History of African American Art (1985–2015) (under contract with I. B. Tauris); a literary biography Living Parchments: Artistry and Authorship in the Life and Works of Frederick Douglass (under contract with Yale University Press); and Struggles for Liberty: Frederick Douglass's Family in Letters, Writings, and Photographs (under contract with Temple University Press). In addition, she made significant progress on two coauthored books: Inside the Invisible: Slavery and Memory in the Works of Lubaina Himid (1985–2015) with Alan Rice and Hannah Durkin (under contract with Liverpool University Press) and If I Survive: Frederick Douglass and His Family, in the Walter O. Evans Collection, with Andrew Taylor (under contract with Edinburgh University Press). She also coedited and contributed an essay " 'A Faithful Representation of the Man?': Pre-Civil War Paintings, Drawings, Sculpture, and Sketches of Frederick Douglass" for Pictures and Power: Imaging and Imagining Frederick Douglass (1818–2018), which she coedited with Bill E. Lawson (Liverpool University Press, 2017). She also did research for The Real Thing: Representing Transatlantic Slavery in Nineteenth-Century African American Writing and Photography Published in Britain and Ireland, coedited with Hannah-Rose Murray. She wrote the introductory essay, annotated, and compiled the scholarly and historical materials for the 2018 anniversary edition of the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (Broadview Press, forthcoming). In addition, she published two journal articles: " 'To Preserve My Features in Marble': Post-Civil War Paintings, Drawings, Sculpture, and Sketches of Frederick Douglass: An Illustrated Essay" in Callaloo (vol. 39, no. 2, 2016) and "No More 'Poisonous, Disrespectful, and Skewed Images of Black People': Barbara Walkers' Louder Than Words" in NKA: Journal of Contemporary African Art (vol. 2016, no. 38–39, 2016). She also edited an article "Tracing the Afterlife and Afterdeath of Transatlantic Slavery in Kimathi Donkor's UK Diaspora (2007)" for NKA (forthcoming).