Matthew Fox-Amato is a cultural historian of the United States and a historian of visual and material culture. He recently published Exposing Slavery: Photography, Human Bondage, and the Birth of Modern Visual Politics in America (Oxford University Press, 2019). Drawing upon an original source base that includes unpublished and little-studied photographs of enslaved people, ex-slaves, and abolitionists as well as written archival materials, this book revises our understanding of the experience of late slavery (by putting visual culture at the center) as it simultaneously rethinks the relation between early photography and racialized forms of power and resistance. The manuscript is based upon his dissertation, which won the McNeil Center’s prestigious Zuckerman Prize for 2014 — awarded to “the best dissertation connecting American history (in any period) with literature and/or art.” It has been reviewed so far in venues including The Wall Street Journal, Boston Review, The Philadelphia Tribune, and the Florida Courier.
