Daniels Auditorium, North Carolina Museum of History
Speaker: Jasmine Nichole Cobb, author and professor of African and African American Studies and of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies, Duke University
Join the museum as we celebrate Women’s History Month by welcoming author and professor Jasmine Nichole Cobb for an author talk and book signing featuring her new book New Growth: The Art and Texture of Black Hair. This talk explores the history, culture, and significance of Black hair in the context of US slavery. Beginning with abolitionist writer Harriet Jacobs, who endured bondage in Edenton, this discussion reveals how 19th-century Americans viewed Afro-textured hair. Topics include cranial science, travel illustration, antislavery activism, and life writing by Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass.
Cobb is a professor of African and African American Studies and of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies at Duke University, as well as a codirector of the “From Slavery to Freedom” (FS2F) at the Franklin Humanities Lab. A scholar of Black cultural production and visual representation, Cobb is the author of two monographs, Picture Freedom: Remaking Black Visuality in the Early Nineteenth Century (NYU Press 2015) and New Growth: The Art and Texture of Black Hair (Duke University Press 2022). She is the editor for African American Literature in Transition, 1800–1830 (Cambridge University Press 2021), and she has written essays for Public Culture, MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, and American Literary History.
Her third monograph in progress, The Pictorial Life of Harriet Tubman, offers a visual history of the abolitionist, from the middle 19th century through the present, including the persistence of the abolitionist’s image in contemporary art and popular culture.