May 2, 2025
This interview with Dr. Earnestine Jenkins was recorded in the Memphis Listening Lab on July 6, 2022.
Dr. Earnestine Lovelle Jenkins is an Full Professor of Art History in the Department of Art & Design at the University of Memphis, where her scholarship focuses on the visual cultural history of the African Diaspora. The objectives of her research, publications and teaching supports scholarly arts education in the growing area of African American and African Diaspora art histories. Dr. Jenkins was named among the top five Black women to know in the art world by Forbes magazine (October 2020).
Dr. Jenkins is interested in the centuries of exchange throughout the African Diaspora across regions, cultures, and histories. Having trained in the fine arts, art history, and history my methods-theories of analysis are comparative and interdisciplinary. Specific research Interests encompass American art & culture; researching African American artist of the 20th century; 19th and 20th century African American photography and photographic culture; the relationship between the arts-politics-leadership, including 19th – early 20th century Ethiopia, and Black visual culture studies of the urban south.
Dr. Jenkins received her BFA in Painting from Spelman College in 1979. Later she went on to receive her PhD in History from Michigan State University in 1997. Her secondary areas of study include West African History, African Art History, African American History, Comparative Black/African Diaspora Studies, and Gender Studies.
Her many recent publications include “Reckoning with Nobosodru Mangbetu Woman: Chronicling Black Women’s Histories in Carrie Mae Weems’ From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried,” in the book Black Artists in America that she edited for Dixon Galleries and Gardens in association with Yale University Press, to be released in 2026 and the Afterword in Douglass Family Lives: The Anna Murray and Frederick Douglass Family Collected Works and Biography Books 1-6, (Edinburgh University Press) as well as Douglass Family Lives: An Anthology, (Edinburgh University Press and Duke University Press), editor, Celeste Bernier, 2025. Additionally she wrote “The American Negro Artist Looks at Africa: The Art Historian James A. Porter and African Diaspora Art Histories,” in Black Artists in America: from Civil Rights to the Bicentennial, editor. Dixon Galleries and Gardens in association with Yale University Press, 2024 and James Little: Homecoming, catalogue for the exhibition ‘James Little: Homecoming,’ Dixon Galleries and Gardens, April 17, 2022 – July 10, 2022, Memphis, TN. Dixon Galleries and Gardens: Memphis, Tennessee, 2022.
The Drowned in History podcast with Dr. Jenkins is mentioned several times.
