Afterimages of grief and mourning

Tina Campt is Roger S. Berlind ’52 Professor of Humanities at Princeton University. She holds a joint appointment between the Department of Art and Archeaology and the Lewis Center for the Arts. She is a black feminist theorist of visual culture and contemporary art and lead convener of the Practicing Refusal Collective and the Sojourner Project. She began her career as a historian of modern Germany, earning a Ph.D. in history from Cornell University. She is one of the founding scholars of Black European Studies, and her early work theorized gender, racial, and diasporic formation in black communities in Europe and southern Africa, with an emphasis on the role of vernacular photography in historical interpretation. Campt’s more recent scholarship bridges the divide between vernacular image-making in black diasporic communities and the interventions of black contemporary artists in reshaping how we see ourselves and our societies. Her teaching reflects her ongoing interest in exploring the multiple sensory registers of images and the importance of attending to their sonic and haptic registers.

Campt has published five books and received the 2020 Photography Catalogue of the Year Award from Paris Photo and Aperture Foundation for her co-edited collection, Imagining Everyday Life: Engagements with Vernacular Photography (with Marianne Hirsch, Gil Hochberg and Brian Wallis, Steidl, 2020). She has held faculty positions at Brown University, Barnard College-Columbia University, Duke University, University of California-Santa Cruz, and the Technical University of Berlin.