"Pushing Through the Glass Ceiling: Nineteenth-Century Black American Women in Europe"

GSHAAA and the History of Art & Architecture department have the pleasure of inviting you to a guest lecture by Dr. Sirpa Salenius, Associate Researcher at the Laboratoire de Recherche sur les Cultures Anglophones (LARCA) (Paris, France). Dr. Salenius is a member of EU-funded COST Action "Women on the Move," her research focuses on transatlantic mobility, race, gender, and sexuality. She has graciously offered to give a talk to the HAA community and will present a paper entitled: "Pushing Through the Glass Ceiling: Nineteenth-Century Black American Women in Europe" The presentation provides examples of what it was like to be a Black woman in Europe in the nineteenth century by examining the experiences of Mary Edmonia Lewis (1844-1907), Sallie Mercer (1829?-1894), and Sarah Parker Remond (1826-1894). In Europe, Lewis became successful as professional sculptor, chiseling statues that often bore a political message of Black liberation and gender emancipation; Remond became an abolitionist lecturer when politically active Black (and white) women were uncommon, and she graduated as obstetrician from one of the most prestigious medical schools of Europe located in Florence, Italy; and Mercer became the confidential companion of the actress Charlotte Cushman, whose household Mercer managed, a responsibility not commonly assigned to a Black woman at the time. Their achievements placed these women in dramatic contrast to stereotypes and they resisted conventional readings of Black women, creating a rupture in the dominant white transatlantic narrative as they moved—geographically, socially, culturally, intellectually, and politically.