Caroline A. Brown, Associate Professor of English, is an alumna of Vassar College (BA) and Stanford University (MA/PhD). She specializes in 20th-century US literature and culture, women's studies, and the literature of the African Diaspora. Professor Brown is the author of The Black Female Body in American Literature and Art: Performing Identity (Routledge, 2012), which examines how African-American writers and visual artists interweave icon and inscription in order to (re)envision the black female body, traditionally rendered alien and inarticulate within Western discursive and visual systems. Analyzing how the works of contemporary African-American women novelists intersect with those of postmodern visual artists, The Black Female Body maps how black aesthetic and performative practices reimagine American citizenship and national belonging.

Professor Brown is currently at work on two projects. Dark Eros: Madness, Mayhem, and Cultural Mourning in Women's Novels of the Black Diaspora is a book-length project analyzing black women's experimental writing strategies as the crossroads where aesthetic praxis morphs into political engagement. Barack Obama: A Cultural Study explores Barack Obama as the template on which she graphs the intersections of race, demographic shift, and presidential politics. In doing so, she interrogates both the influence of popular culture on political transformation and the impact, in turn, of politics on cultural production.

Book

• The Black Female Body in American Literature and Art: Performing Identity. New York: Routledge, 2012. Series: Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature.

Articles in Refereed Journals

• "Marketing Michelle: Mommy Politics and Post-Feminism in the Age of Obama." Comparative American Studies.Special Two Issue Edition: Texting Obama: Politics/Poetics/Popular Culture. 10.2-3 (2012). (Forthcoming Spring 2012.)
• "A Divine Madness: The Secret Language of Trauma in the Novels of Bessie Head and Calixthe Beyala." Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East. (Winter 2008): 93-108.
• "Of Blues and the Erotic: Corregidora as a New World Song," Obsidian III 5.1 (Spring/Summer 2004):118-138.
• "Reconstructing the Paradigm: Teaching Across the Disciplines," co-authored with Alexia Pollack, The Journal of Undergraduate Neuroscience Education 3.1 (Fall 2004): A9-A15.
• "What Nick's Careless Laughter Both Reveals and Obscures: Reading Race in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby," The Journal of Pedagogy, Pluralism, and Practice 8 (Spring/Fall 2004).
• "The Representation of the Indigenous Other in The Piano and Daughters of the Dust," National Women's Studies Association Journal 15.1 (Spring 2003): 1-19. Reprinted in The Visible Woman: Female Representation in Performance and Visual Culture. Eds. Olga Mesropova and Stacey Weber-Feve. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 2010. 234-252.
• "Golden Gray and the Talking Book: Identity as a Site of Artful Construction in Toni Morrison's Jazz," African American Review 36.2 (Winter 2002): 461-474.

Book Chapters

• "The Mad Woman's Other Sisters: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Gloria Naylor, and the Re-inscription of Loss." Charlotte Perkins Gilman: New Texts, New Contexts. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2011. Eds. Jennifer Tuttle and Carol Farley Kessler. 200-221.
• "Sounds of Silence: Releasing Lesbianism's Captive Song from the Muted Cadences of No Telephone to Heaven." Changing Currents: Transnational Caribbean Literary and Cultural Criticism. Trenton, NY: Africa World Press, 2006. Eds. Emily Williams and Melvin Rahming. 31-46.