Dr. Emily Burns, a professor at the University of Oklahoma, will be presenting her current research titled, "Building Black Histories and Futures Through Diorama: Architectural Models on Exhibition, 1900-1940."
Her lecture will be on Tuesday, April 23rd at 5:30 pm in Richards Hall room 15. The lecture is free and open to the public.
From the Universal Exposition in Paris in 1900 to the Jamestown, Virginia, Tercentennial Exposition of 1907 to the American Negro Exposition in Chicago in 1940, diorama series made by African American artists explored and celebrated Black histories. This talk shows how interrelated these dioramas were and analyzes how architectural copies—both of generic building types such as the cabin and the plantation house, and of replicas of specific buildings such as the M Street School, a structure at Howard University, and the White House in Washington, D.C.—functioned to either signal racial oppression or transcendence from oppression in the construction of public historical memory of African American culture and identity.
Burns earned a B.A. in art history from Union College, an M.A. in art history and theory from the George Washington University, and a Ph.D. in art history and archaeology from Washington University in St. Louis.
At the University of Oklahoma, she teaches courses on American art and the art of the American West.
Burns is a scholar of the transnational 19th century, with an interdisciplinary research practice that analyzes artists and works of art moving through space and between cultures, with a focus on relationships between the U.S. and Native American artists, as well as dialogues between French, U.S. and Native American artists.
She is the author of “Transnational Frontiers: The American West in France” (University of Oklahoma Press, 2018) and co-editor of “Mapping Impressionist Painting in Transnational Contexts” with Alice M. Rudy Price (Routledge, 2021), as well as co-editor for an issue of “Transatlantica on the American West in France” with Agathe Cabau (2019).