Biographical Information:
Christina Knight is Assistant Professor of Art History as well as the Mellon Assistant Professor of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in African American Studies with a primary field in the History of Art. Before joining the Rutgers faculty, she was the founding director and Assistant Professor of Visual Studies at Haverford College, a Consortium for Faculty Diversity Postdoctoral Fellow at Bowdoin College as well as a Ford Foundation Diversity Fellow. Knight’s work examines the connection between embodied practices and identity, the relationship between race and the visual field, and the queer imaginary. She is currently completing a book manuscript that focuses on representations of the Middle Passage in contemporary American visual art and performance. Knight is also at work on a new project that examines the influences of drag culture on contemporary black art. Additionally, she is the director of knightworks dance theater, which she co-founded with her sister in 2013.
Undergraduate Classes Taught:
Critical Issues In Art History: Introduction To Visual Studies
African American Art: The (Black) Artist as Historian
Graduate Classes Taught:
Topics In Contemporaneity: Black Performance Theory
Special Topics in Art History: Black Otherwise Worlds
Selected publications:
Books:
The Ship That is the Body: the Middle Passage in Time-Based Art, 1986-1994 (manuscript in progress)
Articles:
“A Family Affair: Jacolby Satterwhite’s Queer Utopics.” Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art 47 (November 2020): 56-66.
“Rebirth is Necessary.” ASAP/J, Black One Shot series 10.4 (July 2020).
“Feeling and Falling in Arthur Jafa’s Love is the Message, the Message is Death.” The Black Scholar 49.3 (Fall 2019): 36-47.
Other publications:
“New World or no world: Middle Passage as Arrival.” In Arrivals, edited by Heather Ewing and Michael Gitlitz. New York: Katonah Museum of Art (October 2021): 16-19.
“Two South African Artists Reflect on the Memories of Apartheid.” Aperture. Spring 2023.
“Race and Performance After Repetition” (Review). The American Literary History Online Review. Fall 2021.
Selected fellowships, awards and distinctions
Fellow, The Department of Art History and Archaeology, Columbia University. Spring 2022.
Visiting Scholar, The Center for Black Visual Culture, New York University. July 2019-June 2020.