Charmaine A. Nelson

2025-2026

McMillan-Stewart Fellow

Charmaine A. Nelson was appointed a Provost Professor of Art History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2022 where she founded the Slavery North Initiative. Her nine books include The Color of Stone: Sculpting the Black Female Subject in Nineteenth-Century America (2007), Slavery, Geography, and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Marine Landscapes of Montreal and Jamaica (2016), Towards an African Canadian Art History: Art, Memory, and Resistance (2018), The Precariousness of Freedom: Slave Resistance as Experience, Process, and Representation (2024), and Creolization and Transatlantic Blackness: The Visual and Material Cultures of Slavery (2025). Nelson was a consultant and on-camera expert for the CBC’s Black Life: A Canadian History (2023) and Hungry Eyes Media’s BLK: An Origin Story (2022) which won five Canadian Screen Awards in 2023. She has also held several prestigious fellowships and appointments including a Caird Senior Research Fellowship, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, UK (2007) and a Fulbright Visiting Research Chair, University of California Santa Barbara (2010). She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a member of the American Antiquarian Society. Nelson received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Universities Art Association of Canada in 2024.

Fellowship Project

Joe the Pressman: How an African-Born Man Refused a Life of Slavery in Canada

Charmaine Nelson's fellowship project centers on the African-born man called Joe who was enslaved by the co-founders and co-owners of the Quebec Gazette, William Brown (c. 1737-1789) and Thomas Gilmore (1741-1773). The pair forced Joe to work in their printing office where he became fluent in English and French, eventually becoming the pressman (Brown, May 1786). Alongside other primary source like business ledgers, the book seeks to analyze six sets of fugitive slave notices (1777 to 1786) as unauthorized visual portraits which reveal Joe’s aging/growth, knowledge acquisition, and literacy; in other words, his creolization. Joe’s fragmented biography and piecemeal representation (only details Brown hoped would lead to his capture) expose the interwoven violence of the colonial archive with psychological and physical brutality. Joe the Pressman explores enslaved labour, literacy, and resistance in eighteenth-century Canada and uncovers the complexity and heterogeneity of blackness in the British province of Quebec, while expanding the definition of creolization to encompass slave minority populations in temperate climate regions.