Poetry, Race and Art
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Amanda Holiday is P/T Techne AHRC doctoral candidate at the University of Brighton researching the ways in which black poets respond to 'pictured blackness' in art (black ekphrasis).
The two-pronged interdisciplinary approach proposes expansive ways of comprehending pictured blackness and also offers an embodied and immersive way of understanding ekphrasis, black and even decolonial ekphrases and opens up important interdisciplinary dialogue in this area.
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This year she undertook an UKRI International Fellowship to the Smithsonian's NMAAHC where she expanded her research, met curators and historians, visited numerous galleries and saw key exhibitions. Part of her research was shortlisted for the 2025 Art Writing Prize.
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Holiday's essay 'Towards Black Ekphrasis' appears in Oxford Poetry issue 94, 2022 (click image to purchase).
Holiday was invited to speak as part of the 'Black Poetics and Aesthetics' panel at the 24th edition of the Gwendolyn Brooks Black Writers Conference (Chicago State University) on 28th October, 2022.
Holiday gave the 2022 Morag Morris Poetry Lecture at the University of Surrey
Holiday gave a version of this lecture as part of the London Drawing Group's Feminist Lecture Spring Programme on 29th May, 2022
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Holiday presented part of her research into black ekphrasis on a panel as part of the 5th Postgraduate International Conference: 'A Driving Force. On the Rhetoric of Images and Power' at Ca' Foscari University, Venice in Oct 2023.
Visions Unveiled
Unfolding Narratives of Art History
Amanda Holiday presented a short paper 'Black ekphrasis and the Wilde Woman of Aiken' as part of this conference at the University of Exeter on June 14th, 2024.
More details and links to follow - keep an eye on this page for updates.