Sarah Lewis
John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities and Associate Professor of African and African-American Studies, Harvard University; Founder, Vision and Justice Project
Sarah 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 the founder of Vision and Justice, an initiative on the role visual culture plays in American equity and justice. Lewis’ books and edited volumes include “Carrie Mae Weems,” “Vision and Justice” and “The Rise.” Her forthcoming book is “The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America.” Lewis’ scholarship has received the Arthur Danto/American Society for Aesthetics Prize from the American Philosophical Association and Freedom Scholar Award from the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. Named an Andrew Carnegie fellow in 2022, her research has received fellowships and grants from Ford Foundation and Harvard’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research.
Previously
Images communicate truths, and also lies. Learning to pay attention to photographs can help us discern. An art and cultural historian and a visual artist host a master class o...
From the ancients to our forefathers to our modern-day achievement-obsessed culture, the question of what makes us happy continues to perplex. Why are we eternally fascinated...
Is a thing of beauty, as Keats wrote, “a joy forever?” Or is it, as in the view of Camus, “unbearable”? The precise nature of beauty and how to understand its role in our live...
For more than three decades, artist Carrie Mae Weems has created a body of work — including photographs, fabric, text, audio, and video — that probes the fault lines of race,...
How do we “read” a photograph? What is the relationship between art production, culture, and justice? And how can photography, which has been used to shape notions of racial i...
Art historian Sarah Lewis (Harvard University) and architect Michael Murphy (MASS Design Group) discuss the art and architecture of social justice in America. How do our artis...
“Truth,” wrote Frederick Douglass, “belongs, like the earth, to all the earth’s inhabitants.” In the search for truth, how do storytellers of all types “pay honor to the full...