Daphne A. Brooks

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Daphne A. Brooks is a professor of English and African American studies at Princeton University, where her research focuses on 19th- and 20th-century African American literary and cultural production, performance studies, black feminist theory, and popular music studies. She is the author of Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1910 (Duke University Press, 2006) and Jeff Buckley’s Grace (Continuum, 2005).

While in residence at the Radcliffe Institute, Brooks will work on her third book, titled Subterranean Blues: Black Women and Sound Subcultures—from Minstrelsy through the New Millennium (Harvard University Press, forthcoming). She will trace what she calls the “secret histories” of African American female artists in popular music from the postbellum era through the turn of the 21st century. Her goal in writing Subterranean Blues is to reveal the innovations and culture-altering performative aesthetics of black female entertainers who helped shape modernity.

Brooks holds a PhD and an MA in English from the University of California at Los Angeles and a BA from the University of California at Berkeley. She is the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including the 2007 Errol Hill Award (for Bodies in Dissent); the Ford Foundation postdoctoral fellowship; the Mellon Predoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities; the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture Scholar-in-Residence Program fellowship; the University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship; the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute Fellowship; and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation’s Career Enhancement Fellowship for Junior Faculty.

Queen of Soul—and Body (Harvard Gazette, 11/12/10)