Sarah Lewis ’01 remembers being approached by painter Jacob Lawrence while on a family visit to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. “I was very young—tiny—and I remember him breaking away from whatever storied crowd was around him, just to say hi to this African-American family in the museum.” Lewis’s parents weren’t artists themselves, but “They made sure I understood the importance of African-American culture.” Now assistant professor of history of art and architecture and African American studies, Lewis grew up with interests in painting, photography, and dance, thinking she’d continue them at the College. Instead, she was drawn to the social and political dimensions of the arts. Her clarity of thought on race in the arts has earned her public recognition rare for her field. In her course “Vision and Justice,” students look at daguerreotypes commissioned by Harvard naturalist Louis Agassiz, who attempted to prove different races were descended from different lineages. “The categories of race and citizenship are deeply tied to the category of aesthetics,” Lewis explains. “These were photographs that were instrumentalized for racial science.” While working on her Ph.D. at Yale, she came upon a previously unstudied speech by Frederick Douglass, who lived during the birth of both racial science and photography. Douglass anticipated the power of that new medium not just to dehumanize, but also to “read African Americans back into the human family,” Lewis argues with arresting precision, her self-possession mirroring Douglass’s own. This was why he became the most photographed American man of the nineteenth century: “Not the most photographed African-American man—the most photographed American man.”
Sarah Lewis

Sarah Lewis
Photograph by Stu Rosner
You might also like
Harvard Ramps Up Fundraising as Research Cuts Deepen
This week in the battle between Harvard and the Trump administration
AI is Making Medical Decisions — But For Whom?
Doctors warn that without an ethical framework, patients could be left behind.
Plans for a Faculty Senate Move Forward
And annual awards for excellence in teaching, advising, mentoring, and scholarship
Most popular
Explore More From Current Issue
A Harvard Love Story in Poetry
Young love: the poem, plus enduring lessons from a public-health pioneer
Chinese Immigrants in Early America
Michael Luo ’98 on the first great wave of immigration—and of nativist anti-immigrant reaction