Lisa Homann

Lisa Homann is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Penn Humanities Forum (2013-2014) and holds an MA and a PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles. She specializes in West African masquerade practices from the late 19th century to the present. Her research concentrates on performance, innovation, Islam and Muslim identities, and theories of representation. She serves on the editorial board of the journal African Arts, and has been conducting research in Burkina Faso since 2006.

Currently she is working on her first book, tentatively titled Visibly Muslim: White Mask Performance in Southwestern Burkina Faso. It considers how a masquerade, through its visual aesthetic and performance, can identify participants as Muslims and strengthen and challenge expectations of appropriate (public) behavior. While focusing on the history of this masquerade’s visual and performance aesthetics, the book project aims to problematize a perceived binary hostility between Islam and African art, particularly masquerade.

Homann offers courses ranging from an introductory survey of visual and material culture in Africa to contemporary African art, West African art and display, African American art, and advanced topics on masquerade.