Dr. Denise L. Lim is an Assistant Professor of Black Material and Visual Culture in the Art and Design History and Theory (ADHT) program at The New School’s Parsons School of Design. She was formerly a Mellon Postdoctoral Scholar (2022-24) with the New School’s Mellon Initiative for Inclusive Faculty Excellence.

Dr. Lim is a transdisciplinary Africanist scholar working at the intersections of art, design, and social scientific inquiry. She has spent 18 years primarily researching South African art, architectural design, cultural heritage, and literature, but has also researched, taught, and curated cultural collections from Nubian Egypt, Ethiopia, the Sudan, and South Sudan. Her work draws from material and visual culture to explore the politics of identity, place, and time throughout diverse African and African diasporic contexts. With the support of the NEH-Mellon Fellowship for Digital Publication, Dr. Lim is completing her first digital monograph, Palimpsests in Ponte City, which explores the complex heritage of an iconic residential tower called Ponte in Johannesburg, South Africa. Treating multi-sensory data as cultural palimpsests, this interactive website takes users on a virtual tour to uncover legacies of colonialism and apartheid built into Ponte’s architectural design, visual media, and material artifacts.