Honouring our heroines of 2022: Charmaine A. Nelson rises above it all!

BY PAUL JUNOR

There was great optimism when Dr Charmaine A. Nelson was announced as a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair at the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design University (NSCAD) in 2020.

Her appointment as the Chair of Transatlantic Black Diasporic Art & Community Engagement was intended to expand the scholarship and research into the history of Canada’s involvement in Transatlantic Slavery. To do so she founded the Institute for the Study of Canadian Slavery with the goal of funding traditional academic and artists-in-residence fellows.

Dr Charmaine started her academic career as the first Black scholar hired into a tenure-track, or tenured art history position in Canada in 2001 at Western University in London, Ontario. She subsequently moved to McGill University in Montreal where she taught for seventeen years and authored seven books before leaving in 2020.

Dr Charmaine shared her experiences of racism and sexism at NSCAD. Upon witnessing the disorganization of the university, she directed her student Research Assistant to collect important procedural information to be compiled in a Fellows’ Handbook for the Institute, months in advance of the fellows’ start date. Although a colleague, when reviewing the handbook weeks prior to the fellowship launch gave her student inaccurate payroll information, Dr Charmaine’s supervisor erroneously assumed that she had been negligent in seeking the information in a timely manner.

As Dr Charmaine explains, “No questions were asked about when and how I had gathered the information. There was just a fundamental belief in my incompetence.”

Dr Charmaine was then reprimanded on a group email, which included colleagues and the student. In addition, she was prevented from affixing her name to employee contracts for her research assistants who were funded with her personal research grant. Although she sent repeated emails, the senior administrators of NSCAD refused to engage her in a conversation about the parameters of her authority as the Director of the Institute

After the financial team misappropriated a $10,000.00 annual research stipend, which Dr Charmaine had set aside from her salary, she contacted the administrators of the Tier 1 Canada Research Chairs in Ottawa who promised to follow up with the NSCAD’s provost and chief financial officer. After the interim president failed to act on promises to intervene, Dr Charmaine filed a grievance against the provost to obtain the funds due to her. As Dr Charmaine explained, the process to recuperate her stipend extended across many months, taking valuable time away from her other essential responsibilities, and activities.

It was not an easy decision to turn her back on NSCAD. She states, “The Tier 1 Chair that I won was two back-to-back seven-year appointments, and the teaching is reduced which is a professor’s dream. I was going to teach one class a year for the first seven years, and two for the second seven years. Part of why these Chairs are coveted is because they allow professors the money and time to excel at research.”

She shared in the Fall 2022 issue of the Slavery North Initiative Newsletter that with respect to racially marginalized faculty members “The impact of Canadian universities’ underemployment of BIPOC people, especially as faculty, was soon evident in my: mistreatment, surveillance, and chronic devaluation. Put bluntly, I was treated very poorly and in ways that White men of my experience, reputation, and expertise in such esteemed, senior positions typically are not.”

She notes that her experience at NSCAD was not unique. She writes, “It is a Canadian, western, and even broader problem of how White-dominated academic institutions: mistreat, tokenize, and marginalize their Black, Indigenous, and other people of colour faculty. My mistreatment drove me from my position at NSCAD, a job I had thought I would hold until I retired.”

When she left McGill in 2020, she was only one of 10 Black faculty members in tenured and tenure-track positions out of 1726 professors. She expounded, “The egregious underrepresentation should be unfathomable in twenty-first century Canada.”

Dr. Charmaine has left Canada and has been appointed as a Provost Professor of Art History and the Founding Director of the Slavery North Initiative at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst in Spring 2022. She will now expand the mandate of her research hub to include slavery in Canada and the American North.

Dr. Charmaine was elected as a member of the American Antiquarian Society in October 2022 and inducted as a fellow into the Royal Society of Canada (RSC) on November 25^th, 2022. The press release states, “Her ground-breaking research explores representation of and production by enslaved Africans within Transatlantic Slavery in Canada, the Caribbean, and the USA.”