Tina Campt

---

Tina Campt is Roger S. Berlind ’52 Professor of Humanities, holding a joint appointment between the Department of Art and Archaeology and the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton. Campt is a Black feminist theorist of visual culture and contemporary art and lead convener of the Practicing Refusal Collective and the Sojourner Project. She began her career as a historian of modern Germany, earning a Ph.D. in history from Cornell University. She is one of the founding scholars of Black European Studies, and her early work theorized gender, racial, and diasporic formation in Black communities in Europe and southern Africa, with an emphasis on the role of vernacular photography in historical interpretation. Campt’s more recent scholarship bridges the divide between vernacular image-making in Black diasporic communities and the interventions of Black contemporary artists in reshaping how we see ourselves and our societies. Her teaching reflects her ongoing interest in exploring the multiple sensory registers of images and the importance of attending to their sonic and haptic registers.

Campt has published five books and received the 2020 Photography Catalogue of the Year Award from Paris Photo and Aperture Foundation for her co-edited collection, Imagining Everyday Life: Engagements with Vernacular Photography (with Marianne Hirsch, Gil Hochberg and Brian Wallis, Steidl). In 2024, she received the Photographic Studies Prize from London's Royal Anthropological Institute. Campt has held faculty positions at Brown University, Barnard College-Columbia University, Duke University, University of California-Santa Cruz, and the Technical University of Berlin.

Campt is the faculty convener for the Princeton Collaboratorium for Radical Aesthetics, housed in the Lewis Center for the Arts and the Department of Art & Archaeology.

A Black Gaze: Artists Changing How We See — MIT Press, 2021

Imagining Everyday Life: Engagements with Vernacular Photography (with Marianne Hirsch, Gil Hochberg and Brian Wallis) — Steidl, 2020

Listening to Images — Duke University Press, 2017

Image Matters: Archive, Photography and the African Diaspora in Europe — Duke University Press, 2012

Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender and Memory in the Third Reich — University of Michigan Press, 2004

“The Sound of Defiance” | Aperture, October 2017

Podcast: Imagine Otherwise — Tina Campt on Listening to Images | Ideas on Fire, May 2018

Book Review: A Black Gaze —  “How to see the world ‘with, through, and alongside’ Black artists” | The Washington Post, August 2021

MoMA presents “Black Gazes” — virtual event part of MoMA Forums on Contemporary Photography, October 20, 2021 @ 1:30 p.m.

Podcast: African American Studies at Princeton University — Tina Campt on A Black Gaze, Season 2, Episode 8, June 2022

Virtual Lecture — “Image Complex: Art, Visuality & Power” | October 19, 2022, 10-11:30 AM (AEDT) via Zoom; The Power Institute at the University of Sydney

Campt teaches course “Frequencies of Black Life” and organizes TRAXXX event for students at Brown University and Princeton | Brown Daily Herald, Feb. 26, 2023

Campt leads the launch of the Princeton Collaboratorium for Radical Aesthetics | April 4, 2023

Tina Campt Awarded 2024 Berlin Prize | American Academy in Berlin, May 6, 2024

Summer Reads 2024: Princeton professors share what’s on their lists | Princeton University news, July 2, 2024

Princeton professors Tina Campt and Nell Irvin Painter receive Berlin Prize Fellowship | Princeton University news, July 11, 2024

Royal Anthropological Institute awards Tina Campt with 2024 Photographic Studies Prize