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  4. Celeste Marie Bernier

Dr. Celeste-Marie Bernier

Community
Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience

    Celeste Marie Bernier photo

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    • Custom House 101 S. Water Street

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    Patrick Henry History Fellow 2026-2027

    Celeste-Marie Bernier is the inaugural Professor and Personal Chair of United States and Atlantic Studies in the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, University of Edinburgh, Scotland, U.K. She is a family historian at Frederick Douglass Family Initiatives and an Honorary International Member of the Frederick Douglass Honor Society. In 2023, she held a Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellowship at The W.E.B. Du Bois Research Institute, Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, Harvard University, and was the 2024-2025 Dorothy K. Hohenberg Chair of Excellence at the University of Memphis. She is a leading global advocate and media consultant for preserving African American history and education, and a historian and scholar specializing in the life, literature, and legacy of the Anna Murray and Frederick Douglass family.

    Professor Bernier is an award-winning author, interdisciplinary historian, cultural studies theorist, and educator specializing in United States history and culture, focusing on human rights and social justice in 18th-21st century U.S. history and Transatlantic studies. Her scholarship encompasses African American and Black British histories through archival studies and public history.  She combines historiographies, intellectual traditions, political as well as aesthetic philosophies to understand and explain visual and material cultural objects, textile and architectural styles, and literary movements. Her work is rooted in public humanities, inspiring an artistic lens to view and curate museum exhibits, performances, films, and installations from a uniquely human perspective.

    In 2019, she was awarded an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Leadership Award for her international project Our Bondage and Our Freedom: The Lives and Works of the Frederick Douglass Family for which she co-curated six U.K. and U.S. traveling exhibitions, history tours, and online displays. She continues working as the family historian, researcher, author, scholar, editor, annotator, and project leader of the 10-book series, Douglass Family Lives: The Anna Murray and Frederick Douglass Family Biography and Collected Works with Duke University Press and Edinburgh University Press. For this work, she is the recipient of international and national awards and fellowships (including at Harvard, The National Humanities Center, Library Company of Philadelphia, Memphis, Edinburgh, U.K. Arts and Humanities Research Council, and U.K. Philip Leverhulme Trust).

    Most recently, Dr. Bernier has worked with Maryland State Archives curators, archivists, and government officials, including Maya Davis (Director of the Riversdale House Museum) and Chris Haley (Director of the Study of the Legacy of Slavery in Maryland), to install an exhibition consisting of paintings, photographs, and manuscripts titled Strike for Freedom: Slavery, Civil War and the Frederick Douglass Family in the Walter O. and Linda Evans Collection, as a permanent display in The Maryland State House, Annapolis. She is a distinguished media consultant for film, television, and digital media, including Sir Isaac Julien’s award-winning poetic meditation, Lessons of the Hour: Frederick Douglass, as well as his exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and Charles Randolph-Wright and Marcus Hummon’s stage musical, American Prophet: Frederick Douglass in His Own Words.

    Professor Bernier has written and edited over eighty-five single-authored and co-authored and co-curated books, essays, exhibitions, articles, and guides as well as organized numerous international conferences, workshops, and symposia. She has delivered over 200 keynotes, plenary and invited lectures, and papers nationally and internationally to the public as well as higher education institutions.

    In 2012, she was awarded a Terra Foundation for American Art Program Grant for an international symposium on Art Across the African Diaspora, which was held at the University of Oxford. She is excited to work with the Chesapeake Heartland: An African American Humanities Project on their mission to build a model of grassroots preservation, curation, and interpretation for communities across the region and involve students and community members in the movement.

    “I am overwhelmed with deepest gratitude and deepest happiness.It is the pleasure, privilege, and dream of my life to work with everyone at Washington College’s Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience and to work with the Chesapeake Heartland: An African American Humanities Project. You all inspire me on with everything you breathtakingly inspirationally do, and as Mr. Frederick Douglass beautifully writes, ‘I am grateful to you and for you forever and always.’  Thank you all from the bottom of my heart,” exclaims Professor Bernier.

    Bernier’s single and co-authored books include: Douglass Family Lives: The Anna Murray and Frederick Douglass Family Biography and Collected Works, a 10 book series including the forthcoming book, Anna Murray Douglass: Biography of a Revolutionary (November 17, 2026) : African American Visual Arts; Characters of Blood: Black Heroism in the Transatlantic Imagination; Suffering and Sunset: World War I in the Art and Life of Horace Pippin; Stick to the Skin: African American and Black British Art; Pictures and Power: Imaging and Imagining Frederick Douglass 1818-2018; Inside the Invisible: Memorialising Slavery and Freedom in the Life and Works of Lubaina Himid; Visualizing Slavery: Art Across the African Diaspora; If I Survive: Frederick Douglass and Family in the Walter O. Evans Collection; Battleground: African American Art. She is the editor of a 200- year-anniversary edition of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and editor and co-editor of the Oxford World’s Classics editions of Frederick Douglass’ My Bondage and My Freedom and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass.

    Community Events with Dr. Celeste-Marie Bernier: