Sarah Elizabeth Lewis is an associate professor of history of art and architecture and African and African American studies at Harvard University and founder of Vision & Justice. Her current research focuses on the relationship between visual representation and racial justice in American democracy. Her publications and awards include The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery (Simon & Schuster, 2014), translated into 7 languages; Carrie Mae Weems (MIT Press, 2021), awarded the 2021 Photography Network Book Prize; and “Vision & Justice,” Aperture (2016), winner of the 2017 Infinity Award for Critical Writing and Research. In 2019, she received the inaugural Freedom Scholar Award from the Association for the Study of African American Life and History for her work and its “direct positive impact on the life of African-Americans.”
Her forthcoming publications include How Race Changed Sight in America (Harvard University Press, 2024), Vision and Justice (One World/Random House, Fall 2024), and Groundwork: Race and Aesthetics in the Era of Stand Your Ground Law (Spring 2024). The article on which Groundwork is based won the 2022 Arthur Danto/ASA Prize from the American Philosophical Association for “the best paper in the field of aesthetics, broadly understood.” Lewis received her bachelor’s degree from Harvard University, MPhil from Oxford University, and PhD from Yale University.
Her project, “Vision and Justice,” both a new publication and a publishing imprint, examines the crucial, underexamined function of visual literacy for racial justice in America’s representational democracy.
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