Sarah Lewis is an award-winning author, associate professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, and founder of Vision & Justice, an initiative that reveals the role of culture in representational democracy. She is a winner of the 2026Rabkin Prize. You can read more about Sarah here.

We invited Sarah to have a conversation about her work and ideas. The interview is accompanied by a newly commissioned portrait of Sarah in the Franklin Street Park of Cambridge, Mass., by Kevin J Miyazaki.

The interview has been gently edited for length and clarity. 

Mentioned in this episode:

• If Emmett Till Lived: Freedom on American Ground exhibit curated by Sarah Lewis in collaboration with Reverend Wheeler Parker, Jr. (Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago, fall 2026)

• Reverend Wheeler Parker, Jr.

• If Emmett Till Lived: A Creative Monument edited by Sarah Lewis (DelMonico Books, 2026) 

• Vision & Justice Initiative

• Emmett Till Gets a Bulletproof Memorial by Jasmine Weber (Hyperallergic, Oct. 19, 2019)

• Monument Lab

• Curator Paul Farber

• Civil rights lawyer Sherrilyn Ifill on Instagram

• Writer Siddhartha Mitter (2024 Rabkin Prize winner)

• Writer Vinson Cunningham

• Lonnie G. Bunch III, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution

• Writer Jeneé Osterheldt

• Restorative Justice is Vital: The Ever-Revealing Truths of Emmett Till’s Story by Patrick Weems and Ronald K.L. Collins (Mississippi Free Press, Sept. 26, 2024)

• Artist Kenn Cook Jr.

• Artist Stephen Marc  

• The Effects of Stand-Your-Ground Laws (RAND Corp., Jan. 26, 2026)

• Artist Hank Willis Thomas

• Artist Theaster Gates

• Artist Amy Sherald

• Castle doctrine

• Examining Breonna Taylor’s Death (Academy for Justice, Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, Arizona State University)

• Understanding Race and History Through Photographyby James Estrin, includes an image of musician and artist Shadrach Emmanuel Lee, Sarah Lewis’ (The New York Times, March 24, 2017)

• Chatham House Rule

• Afternoon of Conversation Sarah Lewis’ interview with actor/director Jodie Foster (Aspen Ideas, June 28, 2026)

• Nieman Foundation

• Photographer Dorothea Lange

• Photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson

• Photographer Annie Leibovitz

• Photographer Carrie Mae Weems

• Photographer Dawoud Bey

• Pictures and Progress a speech by Frederick Douglass on Dec. 3, 1861

• On Photography by Susan Sontag (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977)

• Regarding the Pain Of Others by Susan Sontag (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003)

• Sarah Lewis takes over Selena Gomez’s Instagram

• The Unseen Truth by Sarah Lewis (Harvard University Press, 2024)

• Scholar Jennifer Roberts

• Visual Analysis worksheet by professor Jennifer Roberts

• Could You Spend Three Hours Looking at Just One Work of Art? by Shannon Doyne (The New York Times, Nov. 14, 2025)

• The Artist's Struggle for Integrity by James Baldwin (YouTube,1963)

• The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery by Sarah Lewis (Simon & Shuster, 2015)

• Harvard University’s Widener Library

• Novelist, essayist and Harvard professor emerita Jamaica Kincaid

• 14th documentary directed by Ava DuVernay (Netflix, 2026)

• The Global Ideas Stage curated and hosted by Sarah Lewis and Nicola Benedettiati, director of the Edinburgh International Festival (August 2026)

• Exposing Injustice: Incarceration of Japanese Americans Archives (Dorothea Lange Digital Archive, Oakland Museum of California)

• Tule Lake: At This Segregation Center Are 18,000 Japanese Considered Disloyal to U.S. by Carl Mydans (Life Magazine, March 20, 1944)

• Maya Angelou, The Art of Fiction No. 119 interviewed by George Plimpton (The Paris Review, Fall 1990)

• The Joseph Campbell Foundation

• Author Joe Dispenza

• Pulphead: Essays by John Jeremiah Sullivan (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011)

• Photographer and writer Teju Cole

• Photographer Lewis Hine

• MoMA

• Tate Modern

• Aperture

• Grand Canyon National Park

• The Spiral Jetty by Robert Smithson (1970)

• Yale School of Art

• A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit (Penguin Random House, 2006)

• EBONY magazine

• Chicago Defender’s coverage of Emmett Till’s death and funeral

• Journalist Amy Goodman

• Democracy Now!

• Journalist Christiane Amanpour

• Writer Erica L. Green

• Writer Audra D.S. Burch

• Woodrow Wilson (U.S. president, 1913-1921) and segregation

• A Beautiful Resistancecolumn by Jeneé Osterheldt

• Gordon Brown (British prime minister, 2007-2010)

• Economist Adam Smith

• Panmure House

• Rosa Parks

• Shattered Dreams, Infinite Hope: A Tragic Vision of the Civil Rights Movement by Brandon M. Terry (Harvard University Press, 2025)

• Equal Justice Initiative

• Bryan Stevenson founder of the Equal Justice Initiative

• The Legacy of Slavery exhibit (Edinburgh Playfair Library, 2026)

This episode of the Rabkin Interviews was produced by the Dorothea and Leo Rabkin  Foundation, an artist-endowed foundation based in Portland, Maine. The interview was conducted by Mary Louise Schumacher, a journalist and the executive director of the Rabkin Foundation. The portraits were made by artist-photographer Kevin J. Miyazaki. The production team includes Cindy Eggert Johnson, producer; Johnathon Olsen, editor; with research and copy editing by Danielle Yovino and Nan Williams.

Music is HaHaHa by Ariel Shalom, Present in the Past by Flint, Forgotten Dreams(Creative Cut) by Aves, and Dream Loop by Ariel Shalom. The Rabkin Prize is awarded through a nomination process, and an independent jury selects the winners.