Esteemed writers and scholars Campt and Hartman discuss Stan Douglas’s Birth of a Nation (2025), featured in the artist’s career survey at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College.
Introduced by CCS Bard graduate students Alma Chaouachi and Truth Murray-Cole.
Tina M. Campt is Roger S. Berlind ’52 Professor of Humanities in the Department of Art and Archeology and Director of Atelier at the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University. She is a black feminist theorist of visual culture and contemporary art and lead convener of the Princeton Collaboratorium for Radical Aesthetics and the Practicing Refusal Collective. Campt has published five books including A Black Gaze (2021); Listening to Images (2017); Image Matters: Archive, Photography and the African Diaspora in Europe (2012); and Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender and Memory in the Third Reich (2004). She received the 2020 Photography Catalogue of the Year Award from Paris Photo and Aperture Foundation for the co-edited collection, Imagining Everyday Life: Engagements with Vernacular Photography and the 2024 Photographic Studies Award from the Royal Anthropological Institute for distinguished contributions to the study of anthropology and photography.
Saidiya Hartman is the author of Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (1997; Norton, 2022); Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007) and Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (Norton, 2019), which received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, and the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction, the Mary Nickliss Prize from the Organization of American Historians, the Judy Grahn Prize for Lesbian Nonfiction, and the John Hope Franklin Prize from the American Studies Association. She received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2019 and was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2022. She is a member of the Royal Society of Literature and a University Professor.
CCS Bard Speaker Series
Each semester CCS Bard hosts a program of lectures by leading artists, curators, art historians, and critics, situating the school and museum’s concerns within the larger context of contemporary art production and discourse. Speakers are selected primarily by second-year graduate students and also by faculty and staff. All lectures are free and open, and are documented through audio recordings that reside in the CCS Bard Library & Archives and online here.
Accessibility for Public Programs
Recordings
All our programs are recorded through audio recordings that reside in the CCS Bard Library & Archives and online here. To inquire about a recording, please contact CCSVisits@bard.edu.
American Sign Language Interpretation
ASL-English interpretation is available for public programs upon request with two weeks advance notice. To place a request, please contact CCSVisits@bard.edu. Relay and voice calls welcome.
Verbal Description
Verbal description is available for public programs upon request with two weeks advance notice. To place a request, please contact CCSVisits@bard.edu. Relay and voice calls welcome.
Captioning
When public programs are held over Zoom, live transcription is available.
