Lyne Starling Trimble Public Event Series

Black Genius: Race, Science, and the Extraordinary Portrait of Francis Williams

Fara Dabhoiwala, Senior Research Scholar, Princeton University

Wednesday, September 23, 2026
5:45pm, Reception
6:30pm, Lecture and Q&A

American Center for Physics
555 12th Street NW, Suite 250
Washington, DC 20004

Abstract

In 1928, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London acquired a previously unknown 18th-century portrait. It shows a black Jamaican man, Francis Williams (c. 1690-1762), dressed in a wig, surrounded by books and scientific instruments. In all of the previous history of Western art, there is no other image like this: a person who had been born into slavery, shown as a gentleman and scholar. The museum presumed that the picture was a satire—but who had made it, when, where, and why, remained a mystery. This talk, based on new research, reveals the painting’s astonishing true meaning, its connections to the Enlightenment foundations of classical physics, and Williams’s own place in the history of mathematics and astronomy.

Biography

Fara Dabhoiwala has taught at Princeton University since 2016 and writes about social, cultural, and intellectual history from the middle ages to the present. He previously taught at Oxford University, where he is now a life fellow of All Souls College and of Exeter College. Currently, he is writing the first-ever biography of Francis Williams based on newly discovered sources. His previous books are What is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea, which was published in 2025 by Harvard University Press and Penguin Random House, and The Origins of Sex: A History of the First Sexual Revolution, which has been translated into several languages. He has made radio and TV for the BBC and other channels, and his writing appears in The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, The London Review of Books, and The Shanghai Review of Books, among other places.