Lecture - Virtual | Open to Public Speaker: Mia Bagneris, Tulane University Abstract: Using works like John Bell’s Octoroon (1868) and Robert Gavin’s Quadroon Girl (ca. 1872) as case studies, this talk explores Britons’ pronounced and continued fascination with the figure of the enslaved American mixed-race beauty—even and especially after the abolition of slavery in the United States rendered the potential of such figures as tools for abolitionist suasion obsolete. I analyse marked visual and rhetorical echoes between representations of the so-called “tragic” mulatto, quadroon, o...