Art History MA student Natasha Zabala is preparing to present at the Southeastern College Art Conference in November. Her paper is titled “Into the White Male Mind: The Issue with Cornelis Cornelisz van Haarlem’s Bathsheba’s Black Presence.”

In her paper, Zabala aims to understand the racial and social contexts for Cornelis’s intention to include a black nude female figure in his Bathsheba painting by relying on racial and social contexts and history in sixteenth century Netherlands, and studies on the male gaze. Her paper aims to broaden the knowledge of the circumstances in which this painting was created. The analysis in her essay will reveal that the black body’s position in Bathsheba not only is a reflection on Dutch racial perspectives of blacks in the sixteenth century, but that the black female body becomes an unfortunate object of sexual violence perpetuated by the white male psyche dilemma that rises as a result of Dutch enslavement.