Lyra D Monteiro
Dr. Lyra D. Monteiro (she/zie) is a scholar, artist, and organizer, and the child of a Kenyan-South Asian immigrant and a white descendant of several members of the genocidal Mayflower colony. Her work focuses on the uses of the past in public culture, with a particular emphasis on issues of race, representation, and trauma in the telling of the United States’ pasts. Along with aAliy A. Muhammad, she is the Co-Convener of Finding Ceremony, a reparationist, descendant-led project for the return of stolen ancestral remains held in museums and other colonial institutions. She's currently writing a book titled UnCollect Our Ancestors: Finding Ceremony & the descendant community struggle for the return of the Penn Museum’s Morton Cranial Collection (under advance contract with Penn Press).
After serving as Assistant Professor in Department of History and the Graduate Program in American Studies, and Affiliate Faculty in Africana Studies at Rutgers University‒Newark for twelve years, she is now a Scholar-in-Residence in the Regeneracion Lab in the Department of English at University of California, Santa Barbara.
Her doctoral dissertation, Racializing the Ancient World: Ancestry and Identity in the Early United States, explores how America’s white founders laid claim to the ancient civilizations of Greece, Rome, and Egypt as their racial ancestors; and the development of the counternarrative of a Black Egypt within this context. Two of her essays based on this work, “Power Structures: White Columns, White Marble, White Supremacy” on Medium, and “How a Trump Executive Order Aims to Set White Supremacy in Stone” in Hyperallergic, have become widely cited and taught resources on the longstanding association of classical antiquity with American white supremacy. She is currently she is writing a book titled Liberation Archaeology, which draws upon this material, while also offering a new methodology for people of color to engage with oppressive and traumatic pasts.
Dr. Monteiro’s pathbreaking work on the hit Broadway musical Hamilton set the terms of critical conversation about the play. In her 2016 review essay in The Public Historian, titled “Race-Conscious Casting and the Erasure of the Black Past in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton,” she argued that despite its celebrated multiracial casting, the play reinforces the idea that the United States’ past was populated solely by white people, thus normalizing and legitimizing white power in the present. As the first academic publication about the musical, this article intervened in a near-universal praise for Hamilton’s diverse casting, use of hip hop, and giving the “opportunity” for people of color to see themselves reflected in the founders of this country, by questioning the extent to which any of these were done in a liberatory manner, rather than in service of the neoliberal regime. She is the recipient of the 2016 Walter and Lillian Lowenfels Award for Criticism from the American Book Awards for this work. Ishmael Reed had his characters explore Dr. Monteiro’s work in his 2019 Off Off Broadway play The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda; and Lucy Worsley featured Dr. Monteiro in the BBC4 documentary series, “American History’s Biggest Fibs.”
Dr. Monteiro directs The Museum On Site (TMOS), a public arts/public humanities project, which launched with the installation A Thousand Ships: A Ritual of Remembrance Marking the Bicentennial of the Abolition of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, which reached an audience of 30,000 residents and tourists in Providence, Rhode Island. TMOS’s ongoing public art project, Washington’s Next! began as an answer to the question in President Trump’s post-Charlottesville tweet that said, in part, “Robert E Lee, Stonewall Jackson - who's next, Washington, Jefferson? So foolish!” by recontextualizing the equestrian statue of George Washington that stands in New York’s Union Square Park as a portrait of a slaveowner commanding the 271 men, women, and children of African descent that he owned on the day depicted in the statue ("Evacuation Day," November 25, 1783). The latest manifestation of the project is “How to Kill a Statue,” a digital humanities project which sought to reckon with the unprecedented number of statue attacks during the George Floyd Uprisings by researching and marking the date on which each occurred; and interrogate what has happened to the physical statues that were torn down, dumped in rivers, or removed by government officials, one year later—including how many have already been, or will soon be, re-erected. An interactive map sharing the project’s research on over 100 statue attacks in June of 2020 was published on Indigenous Peoples’ Day/Columbus Day.
Dr. Monteiro’s work and words are regularly featured in publications such as the New York Times, TIME Magazine, The Believer, The Los Angeles Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Buzzfeed, Huffington Post, The Boston Globe, Mother Jones, The Washington Post, and Slate.
Supervisors: Seth Rockman and Susan E. Alcock
After serving as Assistant Professor in Department of History and the Graduate Program in American Studies, and Affiliate Faculty in Africana Studies at Rutgers University‒Newark for twelve years, she is now a Scholar-in-Residence in the Regeneracion Lab in the Department of English at University of California, Santa Barbara.
Her doctoral dissertation, Racializing the Ancient World: Ancestry and Identity in the Early United States, explores how America’s white founders laid claim to the ancient civilizations of Greece, Rome, and Egypt as their racial ancestors; and the development of the counternarrative of a Black Egypt within this context. Two of her essays based on this work, “Power Structures: White Columns, White Marble, White Supremacy” on Medium, and “How a Trump Executive Order Aims to Set White Supremacy in Stone” in Hyperallergic, have become widely cited and taught resources on the longstanding association of classical antiquity with American white supremacy. She is currently she is writing a book titled Liberation Archaeology, which draws upon this material, while also offering a new methodology for people of color to engage with oppressive and traumatic pasts.
Dr. Monteiro’s pathbreaking work on the hit Broadway musical Hamilton set the terms of critical conversation about the play. In her 2016 review essay in The Public Historian, titled “Race-Conscious Casting and the Erasure of the Black Past in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton,” she argued that despite its celebrated multiracial casting, the play reinforces the idea that the United States’ past was populated solely by white people, thus normalizing and legitimizing white power in the present. As the first academic publication about the musical, this article intervened in a near-universal praise for Hamilton’s diverse casting, use of hip hop, and giving the “opportunity” for people of color to see themselves reflected in the founders of this country, by questioning the extent to which any of these were done in a liberatory manner, rather than in service of the neoliberal regime. She is the recipient of the 2016 Walter and Lillian Lowenfels Award for Criticism from the American Book Awards for this work. Ishmael Reed had his characters explore Dr. Monteiro’s work in his 2019 Off Off Broadway play The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda; and Lucy Worsley featured Dr. Monteiro in the BBC4 documentary series, “American History’s Biggest Fibs.”
Dr. Monteiro directs The Museum On Site (TMOS), a public arts/public humanities project, which launched with the installation A Thousand Ships: A Ritual of Remembrance Marking the Bicentennial of the Abolition of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, which reached an audience of 30,000 residents and tourists in Providence, Rhode Island. TMOS’s ongoing public art project, Washington’s Next! began as an answer to the question in President Trump’s post-Charlottesville tweet that said, in part, “Robert E Lee, Stonewall Jackson - who's next, Washington, Jefferson? So foolish!” by recontextualizing the equestrian statue of George Washington that stands in New York’s Union Square Park as a portrait of a slaveowner commanding the 271 men, women, and children of African descent that he owned on the day depicted in the statue ("Evacuation Day," November 25, 1783). The latest manifestation of the project is “How to Kill a Statue,” a digital humanities project which sought to reckon with the unprecedented number of statue attacks during the George Floyd Uprisings by researching and marking the date on which each occurred; and interrogate what has happened to the physical statues that were torn down, dumped in rivers, or removed by government officials, one year later—including how many have already been, or will soon be, re-erected. An interactive map sharing the project’s research on over 100 statue attacks in June of 2020 was published on Indigenous Peoples’ Day/Columbus Day.
Dr. Monteiro’s work and words are regularly featured in publications such as the New York Times, TIME Magazine, The Believer, The Los Angeles Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Buzzfeed, Huffington Post, The Boston Globe, Mother Jones, The Washington Post, and Slate.
Supervisors: Seth Rockman and Susan E. Alcock
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