Petrina Dacres

Petrina Dacres was a Stuart Hall Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African and African-American Research at Harvard University between 2016–17. Petrina is the Head of the Art History Department at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performance Art in Kingston, Jamaica. She has also served as a curator at the campus art gallery, the Cage, and at the National Museum, Jamaica and the National Gallery of Jamaica. 

She specialises in public sculpture, memory and memorial practices and the Caribbean and Black Diaspora Art. Her research has focused on Jamaican national history and public sculpture, the relationship between contemporary art, death and memory and recently, on the trope of Queen Victoria in the African diaspora. Her publications include: Monuments and Meaning (Duke University Press, 2004), “‘But Bogle was a Bold Man’: Vision, History and Power for a New Jamaica” (Small Axe, 2009) and the forthcoming book The Statue in the Park: Commemorating Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in Jamaica.