In her lecture, Campt will present work-in-progress from her latest book project, Art in a Time of Sorrow, which tells the story of how, in the midst of the pandemic, writing about art became a survival tactic that helped her grapple with intense experiences of personal grief during a period of pervasive social grievance. The talk will explore how Black contemporary artists create artworks that speak beyond what we see and give expression to the absent presences that constitute some of the most palpable manifestations of grief and mourning.

Tina Campt is a black feminist theorist of visual culture and contemporary art, and the Roger S. Berlind ’52 Professor of Humanities in the Department of Art and Archeology and the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University.

Campt has published five books including A Black Gaze (MIT Press, 2021); Listening to Images (Duke University Press, 2017); Image Matters: Archive, Photography and the African Diaspora in Europe (Duke University Press, 2012); and Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender and Memory in the Third Reich (University of Michigan Press, 2004). She received the 2020 Photography Catalogue of the Year Award from Paris Photo and Aperture Foundation for the co-edited collection, Imagining Everyday Life: Engagements with Vernacular Photography (with Marianne Hirsch, Gil Hochberg and Brian Wallis, Steidl, 2020) and the 2024 Photographic Studies Award from the Royal Anthropological Institute for distinguished contributions to the study of anthropology and photography.