eLabs Events
Research in Progress: New Projects Committed to Recontextualizing Visual Objects
August 12, 2025 3:00 pm – 4:00 pm Eastern Daylight Time
On August 12 at 3:00 PM ET, join eLaboratories for an engaging event featuring presentations from Kale Serrato Doyen and Letícia Fernanda Carvalho Silva, two PhD candidates and ACLS fellows whose research aims to illuminate the communities and lives of the people depicted in historical photographs and paintings.
Doyen will present on her ongoing dissertation research, entitled “Mapping the Teenie Harris Archive: Photography, Community, and Pittsburgh’s Black Built Environment.” This project seeks to recover histories of displaced Black cultural sites through the digital mapping of architectural photographs by Charles “Teenie” Harris, a twentieth-century photojournalist for the Black newspaper, The Pittsburgh Courier. This presentation will focus on sites Doyen has already identified and their resonances with present-day conditions in Pittsburgh through the process of mapping.
Following, Silva will introduce her research in illuminating the histories of the enslaved women portrayed in Tarsila do Amaral’s seminal painting “A Negra.” She will describe her imminent plans to conduct field work in Brazil, where she aims to connect with the descendants of the women depicted and recover oral histories about their lives.
As these presentations aim to discuss research in progress, this event invites you to think about the challenges and possibilities of recovery as a critical methodology. This webinar is ideal for students and scholars interested in developing recovery projects and in connecting with others doing similar work.
About the Presenters
Kale Serrato Doyen is a Ph.D. student in the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research focuses on how Black and Latinx artists navigate and respond to the racialization of the built environment. She has completed curatorial internships and fellowships at the National Museum of Mexican Art, Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, and the Art Institute of Chicago; and was a recipient of the 2024-25 Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship.
Letícia Fernanda Silva is an Afro-Brazilian doctoral candidate in the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of African American Studies at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Her research focuses on cultures and literature of the Black diaspora, with a focus on the historicization of Black Women’s bodies.
