Sarah Elizabeth Lewis is the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities and Associate Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. She is also a public intellectual, writing for non-academic audiences in the New York Times and The New Yorker, among others. In this presentation, she reads from her new book, The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America, which explores how the fight for independence in the Caucasus that coincided with the end of the U.S. Civil War revealed the instability of the entire regime of racial hierarchy and domination. Images of the Caucasus region and peoples captivated the American public but also showed that the place from which we derive “Caucasian” for whiteness was not white at all. In tracing these fault lines, The Unseen Truth illuminates how visual culture—from paintings to photographs to maps—was used to mask the fictions in the formation of race itself. Ultimately, a new regime of visual literacy came to obscure the specious grounds that legitimated racial hierarchy in America. Lewis discusses what this critical moment in the history of race and sight can tell us, and offers the tools to critically examine the silences in visual culture of all kinds.

ABOUT THE WRITER
Sarah Elizabeth Lewis is the author of the bestseller, The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery, and editor of the award-winning volumes, “Vision & Justice” and the anthology on the work of Carrie Mae Weems (MIT Press). Lewis’s awards include the Infinity Award, the Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, a Cullman Fellowship, the Freedom Scholar Award (ASALH), the Arthur Danto/ASA Prize from the American Philosophical Association, and the Photography Network Book Prize. Her writing has been published in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Artforum, and the New York Review of Books, and her work has been the subject of profiles from The Boston Globe to the New York Times. A sought after public speaker, her mainstage TED talk received over 3,000,000 views and she was a closing speaker at SXSW. She received her BA from Harvard University, an MPhil from Oxford University, an MA from Courtauld Institute of Art, and her PhD from Yale University. She lives in New York City and Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Free. Accessible seats available; for information, call 413 458 0524. A book signing follows the talk. Copies of Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America will be available for purchase at the talk and in the Museum Store.