Petrine Archer [.com]

Being a Caribbean art historian is sometimes difficult to explain. Even though my friends and family take an interest in my work, with only a few opportunities to publish and curate, it can be hard showing others exactly what I do. In Jamaica, we are only now coming to terms with what it is to be an artist, and being something that is an appendage of that, makes me and my work less real. Many are mystified  that what I do enables me to travel so much, to teach abroad and to enjoy uncommon privileges. It is this very disparity between the life I have in Jamaica, and my professional life elsewhere that motivates me, my work, and this website. I am always conscious that my audience is not just academia, but a wealth of people 'at home' in the Caribbean who trust me to do justice to that culture and their lives. I am forever mindful of this responsibility and it is this same sense of commitment and integrity that I hope I  bring to my research and teaching at Cornell and elsewhere.

In the fall of 2005, I joined Cornell’s Society for the Humanities as a post- doctoral research fellow with a standard teaching commitment of a single semester of seminar teaching. My year at the Society was a productive one, exploring the theme of Culture and Conflict in lively and thoughtful seminars and participating in many Cornell events, symposiums, workshops and colloquiums including: Primitivism and Pop Culture, (Lecture) Telluride House, October 2005; Whose Primitivism, Whose Theory? (Lecture) The Society for the Humanities Graduate Workshop in Culture and Conflict, November 2005; Whose Primitivism, Whose Theory? (Lecture) Africana and Queer Studies Perspective Spring Colloquium, February 2006; Black Magic, (Seminar/Lecture) Society for the Humanities, February, 2006; Exoticism in Black and White (Lecture) Visual Studies Colloquium, March 2006; Strange Fruit: Lynching, Visuality and Empire, (Panel Chair) March, 2006; The One Love Workshop, Telluride House, April 2006. In addition, I gave two papers at institutions elsewhere including: Why Not America, Nancy? (Lecture) SUNY Albany, New York State, October 2005; Exoticism, (Lecture) Jungles in Paris Conference, Tate Modern (Bankside) London UK, December 2006. Over the Christmas and Spring breaks I made two significant study trips, the first partially funded by the ASRC to Luxor, Egypt and the second, funded independently, to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

I believe the research begun in these places and the connections I have established will serve well for future academic and exhibition work. Already, I have spearheaded the team that organised a symposium on Ethiopia titled Ethiopia: Monarchy and Modernity that took place at the Johnson Museum and the ASRC in 2007. It is intended that the symposium will generate research for a publication Ethiopia: Monarchy and Modernity, currently under review by the German publishers Prestel and an exhibition with the same name

After an active and successful year of research, teaching and lecturing, I was invited to stay on as a Visiting Associate Professor teaching courses cross-listed between the departments of History of Art, ASRC and Visual Studiesas well as piloting programs for online learning for Cornell's Summer and Winter Sessions

Past experiences: Teaching

My past teaching experience has been varied and centered in a number of institutions in the Caribbean and Britain where I received my masters and doctorate degrees. Before leaving Jamaica, I taught courses in Critical Analysis and Contemporary Jamaican Art at Jamaica School of Art then transferred the same skills to Britain. There, I taught initially at Brixton College, London and latterly at Cheltenham Art College where over a period of five years 1988-1993, I taught Critical Studies.

While completing graduate studies in France, I taught Modern Art History: From Impressionism to Abstraction at the Lacoste Institute's School For the Arts in France (1991) in Lacoste a small village 40 miles south of Avignon, famous for the Marquis de Sade's chateaux and for being a haven for the Surrealists during the second world war.