Title: “Miscegenation in Marble, or the Greek Slave’s Dusky Daughter: John Bell’s Octoroon and the Enslaved Mixed-Race Beauty in British Art and Visual Culture”

Bio: Mia L. Bagneris (Ph.D. Harvard 2010) is the Jesse Poesch Junior Professor of Art History in the Newcomb Art Department, where she teaches African diaspora art history and studies of race in Western Art. Concentrating primarily on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British and American art and visual culture, Dr. Bagneris’s scholarship explores the representation of race in the Anglo-American world and the place of images in the histories of slavery, colonialism, empire, and the construction of national identities.  Her first book Colouring the Caribbean: Race and the Art of Agostino Brunias has just been published by Manchester University Press. Dr. Bagneris’s talk will draw on her research from her in-progress second book, Imagining the Oriental South: The Enslaved Mixed-Race Beauty in British Art and Visual Culture, c. 1865-1880. Dr. Bagneris is the recipient of several prestigious fellowships including a W.E.B. DuBois Institute Fellowship, a Monroe Fellowship from the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South, a Mid-Career Fellowship from the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, and a Collaborative Research Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies.