How Deep and Dark: Slavery, Photography, and the Limits of Narrative

Black Faculty and Staff Association Spotlight Lecture Series

Abstract: Formerly enslaved writers and their White Northern interlocutors embraced photography—the nineteenth-century’s most revolutionary visual technology—to construct new, visually-mediated narrative forms. The lecture will reveal how photographic technologies like the daguerreotype, the carte de visite, and the stereoview transformed how narratives of U.S. slavery were written, read, circulated, and reproduced.

Dr. Kya Mangrum specializes in African American literature, visual studies and African American visual culture. She is a Assistant Professor, in the Department of English, at the University of Utah. Prior to teaching at Utah, she was a Mellon Diversity Postdoctoral Fellow at Cornell University. She earned a doctorate in English from the University of Michigan.