This talk explores the making of the Allen/Littlefield "Without Sanctuary" collection of lynching postcards and its transformation as a museum exhibit. Drawing upon scholarship on material culture and possessions, Barnes investigates the circulation and reinscription of lynching postcards that began as white supremacist mementos of racial violence and have accrued new meanings through exhibition practice.

Natasha Barnes is an associate professor in the departments of African American Studies and English at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She has held fellowships at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and Cornell University's Society for the Humanities. In 2009, she was awarded the Cox Family Distinguished Visiting Fellowship at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Professor Barnes is the humanities area editor of the second edition of Gale's Encyclopedia of Race and Racism (forthcoming in 2013) and has been awarded a Silver Circle Award for Teaching Excellence in 2009. She is currently writing a book about at the exhibition history of the James Allen/John Littlefield Without Sanctuary lynching photography collection and has published articles in Small Axe, Researches in African Literatures and the Journal of American History.