Renée Ater: Monuments, Slavery, and the Digital Humanities

On Tuesday, April 30, 2019 at 4 p.m. in the Digital Scholarship Lab at the Rockefeller Library, Renée Ater will give a talk entitled, “Monuments, Slavery, and the Digital Humanities.”   Free and open to the public. A reception will follow the talk.   In this public lecture, Renée Ater discusses the processes and challenges of creating a digital project/publication about the memorialization of slavery. Her project, Contemporary Monuments to the Slave Past: Race, Memorialization, Public Space, and Civic Engagement, investigates how we visualize, interpret, and engage the slave past through contemporary monuments created for public spaces. Through an examination of twenty-five monuments in the South, Midwest, and Northeast, she tells a diverse and multi-layered story about our engagement with slavery in the present. Arranged thematically, she considers six digital case studies that include monuments to the Transatlantic slave trade and the Middle Passage, slavery and the university, resistance to enslavement, Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad, black soldiers and the Civil War, and emancipation and freedom.   Renée Ater is Associate Professor Emerita of American Art at the University of Maryland. She holds a B.A. in art history from Oberlin College (1987); a M.A. in art history from the University of Maryland (1993); and a Ph.D. in art history from the University of Maryland (2000). Her research and writing have largely focused on the intersection of race, monument building, and national identity. Renée is currently a Senior Fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC, working on her digital publication project: Contemporary Monuments to the Slave...