Daphne Ann Brooks

Daphne A. Brooks is an Associate Professor of English and African-American Studies at Princeton University where she teaches courses on African-American literature and culture, performance studies, critical gender studies, and popular music culture. She is the author of two books: Bodies in Dissent: Performing Race, Gender, and Nation in the Trans-Atlantic Imaginary (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006) and Jeff Buckley’s Grace (New York: Continuum, 2005). Brooks is also developing new projects on the politics of black bohemia in post-Civil Rights popular music and literature; and black feminist performance and satire. Brooks has written various articles on race, gender, performance and popular culture such as “Burnt Sugar: Post-Soul Satire and Rock Memory,” This is Pop: Critical Essays from the First Annual Experience Music Project Conference on Popular Music, ed. Eric Weisbard (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2004); “‘It’s Not Right But It’s Okay:’ Contemporary Black Women’s R&B and the House that Terry McMillan Built,” SOULS: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society (5:1), Winter 2003; and “‘The Deeds Done in My Body:’ Black Feminist Theory, Performance, and the Truth About Adah Isaacs Menken,” Recovering the Body: Self Representations by African American Women Writers, eds. Michael Bennett and Vanessa Dickerson (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000). She is also the editor of The Great Escapes: The Narratives of William Wells Brown, Henry Box Brown, and William Craft, (New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, forthcoming) and The Black Experience in the Western Hemisphere, series eds. Howard Dodson and Colin Palmer (New York: Pro-Quest Information & Learning, 2005). Brooks is currently a Behrman Fellow in the Humanities at Princeton and former Samuel Davies Preceptor. She is the past recipient of numerous fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellowship Program, and the University of California Humanities Research Institute. Brooks has also held residence at U.C. Berkeley as a President’s Postdoctoral Fellow and at Harvard University as a W.E.B. DuBois Research Institute Fellow.