About

Renée Ater, Ph.D., created Contemporary Monuments to the Slave Past in Omeka during 2018-2019. The project is in its third iteration with the support of the Brown University Library Center for Digital Scholarship. Currently, Ater is Visiting Associate Professor in Africana Studies at Brown University and Associate Professor Emerita in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at the University of Maryland. An award-winning art historian, her current scholarship and teaching focus on monuments, history and remembrance, and public space. Ater is the author of numerous articles on public monuments and two monographs: one on the Jamaican-American painter Keith Morrison and the other on early twentieth-century sculptor Meta Warrick Fuller. Ater holds a B.A. in Art History from Oberlin College, and M.A. and Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Maryland.

Khanh Vo, Ph.D., is a Digital Humanities Specialist in the Brown University Library Center for Digital Scholarship (CDS). She is the CDS lead for Contemporary Monuments to the Slave Past. Prior to Brown, she worked at the University of Toronto’s Jackman Humanities Institute and Critical Digital Humanities Initiative, where she has served as the 2022-23 Digital Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow. She completed her doctorate in American Studies in 2021 at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. 

Nélari Figueroa Torres is an undergraduate researcher for Contemporary Monuments to the Slave Past, currently compiling and documenting monuments to add to the digital repository. They are a writer and A.B. student in the Departments of Africana Studies and English at Brown University with an emphasis on Caribbean literature, language, and archive theory. They work as a researcher and curatorial support assistant on archival projects that prioritize oral histories and collective memory from marginalized communities as well as alternative archiving practices. They are also interested in the intersection between archival silences and art as a method to provide perspective on what might have happened.

Yui Suzuki, Ph.D., provides developmental editing services to academic authors. She is currently the project editor for Contemporary Monuments to the Slave Past. Besides her work as a developmental editor, Suzuki is an independent scholar and regular lecturer for the Smithsonian Associates World Art History certificate program. She is the author of Medicine Master Buddha: The Iconic Worship of Yakushi in Heian Japan (Brill, 2012), as well as numerous peer-reviewed articles. Suzuki holds a B.A. in Religion and Philosophy and M.A. in Asian Studies from Sophia University in Tokyo, Japan; and a Ph.D. in Art History from the University of California, Los Angeles. She was a faculty member in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at the University of Maryland from 2006-2017.

Grace Yasumura, Ph.D., was the former project manager for Contemporary Monuments to the Slave Past from 2018-2020. In 2019, Yasumura was awarded the three-year Inaugural Luce Foundation Curatorial Fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She is now an Assistant Curator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. With Karen Lemmey and Tobias Wofford, she is co-curator of the exhibition, The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture as well as co-author of the exhibition catalog (Princeton University Press, 2024). Yasumura also holds a B.A. in Peace and Justice Studies from Wellesley College; an M.A. in Art History from New York University; and a Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Maryland.