Africa Table - Mapping Senufo: A Refreshed Look at West African Arts Identified as Senufo

Join the Center for African Studies for our weekly lunchtime lecture series.

Speaker: Susan Elizabeth Gagliardi, Assistant Professor, Department of Art History, Emory University; Distinguished Junior External Fellow, Stanford Humanities Center

Susan Elizabeth Gagliardi is assistant professor in the Art History Department at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. She was named Distinguished Junior External Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center for the 2016-17 academic year. Her scholarship draws on more than thirty months of fieldwork in West Africa as well as archival and museum-based investigations in Africa, Europe, and North America. Research for her first book Senufo Unbound: Dynamics of Art and Identity in West Africa (The Cleveland Museum of Art and 5 Continents Editions, 2015) led her to develop Mapping Senufo, an in-progress collaborative digital publication. With support from the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship in August 2013, she launched the project. She now co-directs it with Constantine Petridis of the Art Institute of Chicago. For the spring semester of 2016, she designed and organized “MAP IT | Little Dots, Big Ideas,” a series of lectures and workshops at Emory. She also developed a graduate-level seminar on mapping and the humanities in conjunction with the series. Her interests in mapping, space, and place recently brought her to South Africa, where she met with artists and other scholars in Johannesburg and Cape Town.