Representation and Visual Culture: A Faculty Roundtable
Dr. Carly Boxer (she/they)
Nancy and Robert J. Carney Postdoctoral Fellow in Medieval Art & Architecture
Rice University
Carly B. Boxer is the Nancy and Robert J. Carney Postdoctoral Fellow in Medieval Art and Architecture at Rice University. Boxer received a PhD in Art History from the University of Chicago. Trained as a historian of medieval art, Boxer’s work centers on the connections between medieval image-making practices and period ideas about vision, knowledge, and the capacity of images to structure and guide thought. Her current book project, Pictures of Health: Medicine, The Body, and Its Image in Late Medieval England, analyzes manuscripts related to medicine, health, and healing to propose that images in these books could train readers in how the human body ought to look, and how it should be looked at.
Leslie Hewitt
Associate Professor of Visual and Dramatic Arts
Rice University
Leslie Hewitt studied at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, the Yale University School of Art, and at New York University, where she was a Clark Fellow in the Africana and Visual Culture Studies programs.
She was included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial and the recipient of the 2008 Art Matters research grant to the Netherlands. Hewitt was the recipient of The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship in 2020 and the Anonymous Was A Woman award in 2022. A selection of recent exhibitions include the Dia Art Foundation, the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Studio Museum in Harlem; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York; The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis; Project Row Houses in Houston; and LA><ART in Los Angeles. Hewitt has held residencies at the Moody Center at Rice University, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and the American Academy in Berlin, Germany amongst others.
She was a faculty member at Barnard College in the department of Art History (2012-2017), where she was actively engaged in The Harlem Semester: A Community Partnership for Social Justice Pedagogy. She was a faculty member at The Cooper Union, School of Art (2017-2022), where she co-organized the Intra-Disciplinary Seminar and public lecture series with curator and writer Omar Barrada.
Dr. Victoria Massie (she/her)
Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Rice University
Victoria M. Massie (she/her) is an Assistant Professor in Anthropology at Rice University, and a faculty affiliate in the Medical Humanities Program, the Center for African and African-American Studies, and the Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. She is broadly interested in the political economy of racialization through emerging biotechnologies that reconfigure the nature of belonging, citizenship, and life itself. Dr. Massie’s expertise sits at the intersection of feminist kinship studies, anthropology of racialization, black feminist bioethics, postcolonial and feminist science studies, vitalism, and biocapitalism, with an area focus on the United States and West/Central Africa. Her latest book project, Sovereignty in Return: The Gift of Genetic Reconnection in Cameroon, examines how the genetic Cameroonian diaspora emerges as speculative capital to facilitate new modes of postcolonial futurity following Cameroon’s 50th anniversary of independence. Dr. Massie received her Ph.D. in Sociocultural Anthropology with a Designated Emphasis in Science and Technology Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. A Hurston/Wright Foundation Fellow, Dr. Massie draws on her experience as a nonfiction writer, poet, and former journalist to experiment with ethnographic form.
Dr. Olivia Young (they/them)
Assistant Professor of Art History
Rice University
Olivia K. Young is an Assistant Professor of African Diasporic Art in the Department of Art History and the Center of African and African American Studies (CAAAS) at Rice University. They are also an affiliate faculty member of Rice’s Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. They are an interdisciplinary scholar whose interests are contemporary art, visual culture, black cultural history, queer theory, black feminisms, and disability studies.
Dr. Young is a Patricia and Phillip Frost Predoctoral Fellowship recipient at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, a 2020 graduate of the Department of African Diaspora Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and a 2021 University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow. Their manuscript, How the Black Body Bends: Sensorial Distortions in Black Contemporary Art, foregrounds the relationship between concepts of blackness, sensate formations, and the under-theorized keyword ‘distortion’ in the artwork of black contemporary artists. Dr. Young prioritizes collective work in the academy. They received a Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Grant for the collaborative blog speculative: black art practices of the west and has published with their collective ‘Crip Chronic Femmes’ in Disability Studies Quarterly and Performance Matters. In the classroom, they center black cultural histories and contemporary art in order to broaden students’ understanding of the role visuality plays in structuring narratives of race, gender, sexuality, and disability.
Moderated by Dr. Tesla Cariani (they/she)
Postdoctoral Fellow, Center for the Study of Women, Gender and Sexuality
Rice University
Tesla Cariani is currently the postdoctoral fellow at the Center for the Study of Women, Gender and Sexuality at Rice University. In 2021, Tesla received a PhD in English as well as a graduate certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Emory University. Tesla is a scholar and teacher of sexuality, gender, and contemporary visual culture with research interests that include questions of queer and trans visibility, affect, and political activism. Tesla has been published in Parallax, PMLA, and in The LGBTQ Comics Studies Reader.