Dr. Huey Copeland is widely recognized as a leader in the fields of global modern and contemporary art, specializing in visual cultures of the African diaspora, Europe, and the United States.
Guided by the interdisciplinary ambitions of Black and feminist studies, Copeland’s research and teaching push history against the grain to reveal the constitutive relationship between the capture of blackened life and the production of cultural property in the modern West. He is the author of the critically acclaimed Bound to Appear: Art, Slavery, and the Site of Blackness in Multicultural America (Chicago, 2013) and co-editor of the award-winning volume Black Modernisms in the Transatlantic World (National Gallery of Art and Yale University Press, 2023). In addition, he has published over 70 essays, interviews, and reviews that have appeared in a range of journals and exhibition catalogues, including Artforum International, Histórias Afro-Atlânticas: Antologia, Modern Women: Women Artists at the Museum of Modern Art, Nka, and Represenations. Dr. Copeland's forthcoming book Touched by the Mother: Black Men, American Art, Feminist Horizons (Chicago, 2026), assembles a number of these works alongside new interventions; the project has already been recognized with an Absolut Art Writing Award intended to support “transformative projects by the world’s most creative talent.”
His work has also garnered prestigious fellowships from the American Council for Learned Societies, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, L’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, and the W.E.B. DuBois Research Institute at Harvard University. As part of his long-standing commitment to socially just art-historical futures, Copeland serves as a director of the Terra Foundation for American Art and sits on the editorial board of October, the discipline's flagship journal of modern and contemporary art history, criticism, and theory.
HAA is honored to welcome Dr. Copeland as the department's Andrew W. Mellon Professor and look forward to supporting his research, teaching, and public-facing initiatives.