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Ren e Ater is associate professor in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at the University of Maryland. She holds a B.A. in art history from Oberlin College, and earned a M.A. and Ph.D. in art history from the University of Maryland. Her scholarship and teaching focuses on American art of the nineteenth and twentieth century with a specialization in African-American visual culture.

For her talk, she will focus on the commemoration of the slave past on university campuses. Often fraught with controversy, these monuments raise significant questions about how universities deal with the legacy of the slave past and its relationship to the academy. It takes as its focus three separate monuments including the Unsung Founders Memorial at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, The Soldiers Memorial at Lincoln University (Missouri), and the Slavery Memorial at Brown University.

Ater is the author of Keith Morrison, volume 5 of The David C. Driskell Series of African American Art (Pomegranate Books, 2005) and Remaking Race and History: The Sculpture of Meta Warrick Fuller (University of California Press, 2011). Her new book project entitled Unsettling Memory: Public Monuments to the Slave Past in the United States considers the flurry of monument building to commemorate slavery, resistance, and emancipation in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in American cities in the South, Midwest, and Northeast.

Co-sponsored by the Department of Art History at UIC.