Anna Arabindan-Kesson is an assistant professor of African American and Black Diasporic art with a joint appointment in the Department of African American Studies. She specializes in African American, Caribbean, and British Art, with an emphasis on histories of race, empire, and transatlantic visual culture in the long 19th century. An international upbringing and interdisciplinary training—in the fields of African American studies and art history—have shaped her intellectual formation. Consequently her research focuses on processes of cultural exchange and geographical movement, underpinned by histories of colonialism, and the legacies of these encounters in contemporary art practice. Drawing on the transnational, even global, perspective that African American Studies provides, her scholarship lies in conceptualizing the ways Black Diasporic art compels us to rethink constructions of national identity, racial formation, and cultural production. These interests are explored more fully in her current book project, The Currency of Cotton: Art, Empire and Commerce 1780–1900. A chapter on 19th-century cultural exchange between New England and Zanzibar is included in the book Global Trade and Visual Arts in Federal New England. Another chapter, on 19th-century photography and South Asian identity in Jamaica, will be published in the edited collection Victorian Jamaica by Duke University Press later this year. She continues to write about and work with contemporary artists in various capacities. Her art criticism has been published in international art and fashion publications in Europe and Australia.