Professor Anna Arabindan-Kesson is an Associate Professor of African American and Black Diasporic art with a joint appointment in the Department of Art and Archaeology and African American Studies at Princeton University.
Born in Sri Lanka, Prof Arabindan-Kesson completed an undergraduate degree in Nursing in New Zealand, worked as a Registered Nurse internationally, before completing a Bachelor of Arts at the University of Western Australia and a PhD in African American Studies and Art History at Yale University. Her research and teaching focus on Black Diaspora Art, with an emphasis on histories of race, empire, and medicine in the long 19th century. She also has interests in British, South Asian and Australian art.
Prof Arabindan-Kesson's work has been published widely. Her first book, Black Bodies, White Gold: Art, Cotton and Commerce in the Atlantic World, was published by Duke University Press in May 2021. She is now working on a co-written book with Prof Mia Bagneris, Beyond Recovery: Reframing the Dialogues of Nineteenth-Century Black Diaspora Art (Routledge, 2023), along with a third book about the plantation and medicine in the former British Empire.
Prof Arabindan-Kesson is the director of Art Hx, a digital humanities project and object database that addresses the intersections of art, race and medicine in the British empire. She is also a Visiting Fellow at the Center for The Study of Social Difference in Columbia University, a 2021 Center for Digital Humanities Data Fellow at Princeton University, the 2022-23 American Academy Rome Prize Terra Foundation Fellow, and a senior research fellow at the Art Gallery of Western Australia.
