Biography
Brigid Conroy is an artist and researcher based in New Orleans, Louisiana. Her work seeks points of connection between place and social memory through artists’ books, community projects, and audio compositions. She holds a Master of Arts in Theological Studies from the Harvard Divinity School, where her research focused on the history of religion and transnational migration in the American Gulf South.
She has received grant support from the Andy Warhol Foundation re-granting program, The Platforms Fund, and scholarships from Penland School of Craft and the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia. Her collaborative chapbook, The Spirit on the Staircase, was published in 2017, and she has worked for seven years as an arts educator and cultural worker in New Orleans.
Research
Undercurrents is an audio documentary and public humanities project that explores the interconnected history of migration and sugar through the lens of Reconstruction-era Louisiana. This project looks at the historical practice of indentured servitude in nineteenth-century Louisiana and places it within the context of “apprenticeship,” a racialized system of labor that was employed on colonial sugarcane plantations. This was a system that relied on coercive, exploitative contracts to employ workers from China and South Asia.
This project works to illuminate the material and ideological connections between the United States and global iterations of empire and colonialism. Undercurrents places the state of Louisiana within this larger, transnational narrative and makes visible an alternative map of the Gulf South—one that traces the movements of both human and nonhuman life and ecologies. This project engages in the work of critical, public countermemory by disrupting progressive settler temporalities and examining some of the fissures, contestations, and ruptures of this region’s past and present.
