Author Talk with Jennifer DeVere Brody

“Moving Stones: About the Art of Edmonia Lewis”

Join Queer History Boston for an evening with scholar Jennifer DeVere Brody, as she takes us inside the queer world of Edmonia Lewis — the Black and Ojibwe sculptor who carved out an international career in nineteenth-century Rome, and whose life and artistry are finally getting the attention she deserves.

Moving Stones explores the extraordinary life and work of Edmonia Lewis, the Black and Ojibwe sculptor who rose to international fame in the nineteenth century. Blending biography, history, and theory, Jennifer DeVere Brody approaches Lewis’s legacy through a Black feminist and queer lens, illuminating how her sculptures and self-fashioning challenged constraints of her time. Living much of her life in Rome as a free Afro-Native woman, Lewis used neoclassical forms to carve out a life in art. Brody considers how Lewis’s works were viewed historically and how they resonate with postmodern artists, engaging themes of race, materiality, sexuality, and embodiment. Rethinking one of the most important sculptors of her era, Moving Stones shows how Lewis’s art continues to inspire contemporary artists and scholars today.

Jennifer DeVere Brody is Professor of Theater and Performance Studies and African and African American Studies at Stanford University.  Her research has been supported by awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, The Monette-Horowitz Foundation to Combat Homophobia, the Ford and Mellon Foundations and the Bogliasco Foundation.  She has published several books with Duke University Press: Impossible Purities: Blackness Femininity and Victorian Culture (1998), Punctuation: Art, Politics and Play (2008),  James Baldwin's Little Man, Little Man (2018) co-edited with Nicholas Boggs and the forthcoming, Moving Stones: About the Art of Edmonia Lewis (2026).