Please join the Department of Art History for a Distinguished Alum Lecture with Dr. Matthew Rarey, Associate Professor of African and Black Atlantic Art History and Chair of Art History at Oberlin College & Conservatory. Dr. Rarey will give the lecture “Renaming the Fetish in the Eighteenth-Century African Atlantic” on Monday, December 2nd, 2024 in L160 Elvehjem Building.
Biography
Dr. Matthew Rarey (UW PhD, 2014) is currently Associate Professor of African and Black Atlantic Art History and Chair of Art History at Oberlin. His first book Insignificant Things: Amulets and the Art of Survival in the Early Black Atlantic (Duke 2023) won the College Art Association’s Charles Rufus Morey Book Award, one of the highest scholarly recognitions in the field. His writings have appeared in African Arts and The Art Bulletin as well as the volumes African Heritage and Memories of Slavery in Brazil and the South Atlantic World (Cambria Press, 2015) and Black Modernisms in the Transatlantic World (Yale University Press, 2023). In 2019, alongside Andrea Gyorody, he co-curated Afterlives of the Black Atlantic at the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College, which received a 2020 Award of Excellence from the Association of Art Museum Curators.
This event is sponsored by the Department of Art History as part of its Centennial Year with co-sponsorships from African Cultural Studies and the Center for Visual Cultures and support from University Lectures and the Anonymous Fund.
