Charmaine A. Nelson is an Associate Professor of Art History at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. Her research is in the areas of Race and Representation and the Visual Culture of Slavery. Her teaching includes courses on Canadian Art, Nineteenth-Century Sculpture, Popular Culture, the Trans Atlantic World, Postcolonial Theory, Black Diaporic Art and Museum Studies. She curated the national exhibition Through An-Other's Eyes: White Canadian Artists - Black Female Subjects (1999) which is also an exhibition catalogue of the same name.

She is co-editor and contributor to the anthology Racism Eh?: A Critical Inter-Disciplinary Anthology of Race and Racism in Canada (Concord: Captus Press, 2004) and author of The Color of Stone: Sculpting Black Female Subjects in Nineteenth-Century America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007) and Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art (New York: Routledge in 2010). Her most recent book is Ebony Roots, Northern Soil: Perspectives on Blackness in Canada (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2010). Her new manuscript project examines nineteenth-century landscapes of Montreal and Jamaica, two colonial trade and slave ports, through critical readings of geography, topography, colonial commerce and travel.

Nineteenth-century neoclassical sculpture was a highly politicized international movement. Based in Rome, many expatriate American sculptors created works that represented black female subjects in compelling and problematic ways. Rejecting pigment as dangerous and sensual, adherence to white marble abandoned the racialization of the black body by skin color.