About

Professor Anna Arabindan-Kesson is an Associate Professor of African American and Black Diasporic art with a joint appointment in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. Born in Sri Lanka, she completed undergraduate degrees in New Zealand and Australia, and worked as a Registered Nurse in the UK before earning her PhD in African American Studies and Art History at Yale University. Her research and teaching focus on Black Diaspora Art, emphasizing histories of race, empire, and medicine in the long 19th century. She has interests in British, South Asian, and Australian art. Professor Arabindan-Kesson is the author of the book 'Black Bodies, White Gold: Art, Cotton, and Commerce in the Atlantic World,' published by Duke University Press, and is working on a second book titled 'Beyond Recovery: Reframing the Dialogues of Nineteenth-Century Black Diaspora Art,' supported by an ACLS Collaborative Research Fellowship. Her second monograph is called 'An Empire State of Mind: Plantation Imaginaries, Colonial Medicine and Ways of Seeing.' She directs Art Hx, a digital humanities project and object database exploring intersections of art, race, and medicine in the British empire. She is a Visiting Fellow at Columbia University’s Center for The Study of Social Difference and a 2021 Center for Digital Humanities Data Fellow at Princeton University. Additionally, she serves as a board member of several arts organizations, curates exhibitions, and collaborates with contemporary artists internationally. Her teaching includes courses on African American and Caribbean Art, as well as specialized seminars on representing slavery, the British Empire, and art, race, and medicine in the British Empire.

Awards & honors

• ACLS Collaborative Research Fellowship
• Center for Digital Humanities Data Fellow at Princeton Unive…

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