Temple University

Nicole Emser (she/her) is a PhD candidate studying the modern and contemporary art of the Caribbean and its diasporas. Her dissertation traces the systematic practices of ordering Caribbean land—from the colonial to the present—mapping the strategies contemporary artists use to repossess historical narratives, the land, and to create otherworlds of futurity. 
 
Her research and professional development have been supported by the Stanford University Libraries, the Huntington Library, the Lewis Walpole Library at Yale, the Clements Library, the French Colonial Historical Society, and the Temple Graduate School. She has presented her work at the College Art Association (CAA), the Association of Caribbean Women Writers & Scholars, the French Colonial Historical Society, and the York University Centre for Refugee Studies. Her most recent work, “World-building and Futurity Through Collaboration in Caribbean Diasporic Art Practices: A Conversation,” co-written with interdisciplinary artist Nyugen E. Smith, was published in Art Journal Open.
 
She is the co-chair of the Student and Emerging Professionals Committee of CAA and serves as their representative on the Annual Conference Committee. She previously taught art history courses at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis and served as the program director for the National Women’s History Museum in Washington, DC. 

MA, Art History, American University, 2011 

BA, History, Xavier University, 2007 

Dissertation Title: “Ordering, Reordering, and Disordering the Land: Visual and Material Strategies of Resistance and Repossession in Contemporary Caribbean Art” 

Advisor: Alpesh Kantilal Patel