Art, Art History, and Film Faculty

Justin M. Brown holds a joint appointment in Art History and African and African Diaspora Studies. His teaching and writing focus on the art and visual culture of the Americas, with an emphasis on the Caribbean. His current book project tells the story of a carved calabash made by an enslaved artist in early nineteenth-century Suriname. Through sustained visual and historical analysis, the book argues that the object registers a multifaceted history of intercultural exchange and translation.

Dr. Brown’s broader research looks at the visual and material afterlives of slavery and empire in the Caribbean and the Americas. His current article-length projects examine tensions over the control of ritual objects in colonial Suriname and the written and visual rhetoric used to frame African-derived religious practices. He also has an interest in Caribbean modernism during the period of U.S. military interventions. He teaches courses on the arts of the Caribbean and Atlantic Africa, the Caribbean Maroons, and interdisciplinary research methods.