“Visualizing Slavery” Conference in New Haven , 7-8 Nov.

On Friday and Saturday, 7-8 November, the Gilder Lehrman Center’s 16th Annual International Conference will take place at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut.

It will be on the theme “Visualizing Slavery and British Culture” and coincides with the museum’s exhibition “Figures of Empire: Slavery and Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Britain.”

The event description says:

Using a cross disciplinary approach, the conference will help place the works in the exhibition in a historical context—Britain and its empire from roughly the 1720s to the early 1800s—and explore the impact of slavery on British art and culture.

The conference intends to build on the growing field of work exploring the relationships between slavery, art, taste, and power, as well as to raise questions about how art, artists, and cultural institutions reckon with slavery’s legacies.

The scheduled presentations include “London’s Black Community, the Somerset Case, and the Politics of Slavery”; “Remembering to Forget: Ignorance and the Curating of Slavery”; “A Colloquial Archive of Color-Conscious Insult and Slang in Eighteenth-Century Britain”; and more.

Registration is free but required for all attendees.