About

Anna Reynolds Cooper is an Associate Professor at the University of Arizona, affiliated with the School of Theatre/Film and Television, and also serves as an Assistant Professor in Social / Cultural / Critical Theory within the Graduate Interdisciplinary Program (GIDP). She holds a Ph.D. in Film and Television Studies from the University of Warwick, Coventry, United Kingdom, where her research included a focus on American cinematic representations of Europe from 1947 to 1964. Her academic background also includes an M.A. in Film and Television Studies from the University of Warwick and a B.A. in Philosophy from Columbia University in New York City. Her professional experience spans several institutions, including the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she worked from 2014 to 2016, and the University of Warwick, University of Sussex, and University of Hertfordshire. Since 2016, she has been a faculty member at the University of Arizona. Her research interests and scholarly contributions are centered around film, television, and cultural theory, with a particular focus on cinematic representations and cultural analysis.

Research topics

• Aesthetics
• Art history
• Literature
• Art
• Visual arts
• Sociology
• Computer Science
• History
• Archaeology
• Internal medicine
• Medicine
• Engineering
• Surgery

Selected publications

• “What are We worth?” A Voice from the South

  2023-04-25

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Wealth must pave the way for learning. Work must first create wealth, and wealth leisure, before the untrammeled intellect of the Negro, or any other race, can truly vindicate its capabilities. The man who consumes more than he produces is a destroyer of the world’s wealth and should be estimated precisely as the housekeeper estimates moths and mice. The world would consider it a happy riddance from bad rubbish if they would pay up their debt and move over to Mars. The worth of a race or a nation can be but the aggregate worth of its men and women. While people need not indulge in offensive boasting, it may not be out of place in a land where there is some adverse criticism and not a little unreasonable prejudice, quietly to take account of stock and see if they really represent a value in this great American commonwealth.

  PublisherDOI

• “Colored Women as Wage-Earners,” Southern Workman and Hampton School Record

  2023-04-25

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  The colored woman as wage-earner must bring to her labor all the capacities, native or acquired, which are of value in the industrial equation. But every wage-earner, man or woman, owes it to the dignity of the labor he contributes, as well as to his own self-respect, to require the rights due to the quality of service he renders, and to the element of value he contributes to the world’s wealth. Colored society is today in available social wealth in the position of a company of pioneers, or where the white American was when he conned his solitary book by the light of a pine knot, and contended with bears and Indians for the possession of his potato patch and his one-story cabin. Economically considered, the colored people in this country are a society of wage-earners, but their standards of living and their judgments of one another are as if they were a race of capitalists.

  PublisherDOI

• Abstract #1408105: Treatment of Bisphosphonate Associated Atypical Femur Fracture with a Combination of Teriparatide and a Novel Surgical Technique

  Endocrine Practice · 2023

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Medicine
  • Surgery
  • Internal medicine
  PublisherDOI

• The American Abroad

  2022 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Art
  • Aesthetics
  • Art history

  <JATS1:p>Drawing on cinema and media studies, art history, American studies, and postcolonial studies, this innovative book offers a fresh way of thinking about Hollywood film aesthetics. It explores how eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Western colonial formations of vision influenced classical Hollywood film style, and thus provides a new and unique perspective on the origins of the cinematic gaze. Classical Hollywood cinema constructs global spaces as an imaginative dreamworld, subsuming geographical and cultural differences into utopian fantasy. Yet, this characteristically Hollywoodian aesthetic has rarely been explored in detail. How are such representations constructed within film texts? Is this utopian aesthetic really as uniform and transparent as it appears? What is its relationship to the United States’ status as an imperial power?</JATS1:p> <JATS1:p>In The American Abroad, Anna Cooper explores how postwar Hollywood cinema adopted elements of British and French imperial visual culture, transforming them to suit a new United Statesian context. Cooper argues that four visual discourses in particular—the sublime, the ethnographic, the picturesque, and glamour—became building blocks in the development of a new American visual language.</JATS1:p>

  PublisherDOI

• Literacy, the Woman’s Era, and the Literary Imagination

  University Press of Mississippi eBooks · 2022-11-29

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter outlines a brief history of the purposes of literacy instruction in the mid-nineteenth century. Additionally, this chapter describes the uses of literacy for Black people. Some Black public intellectuals and creative writers believed the persuasive power of the word could provide them the means to dismantle racial oppression and to affirm the humanity of Black people. With ferocity and intellectual acumen in 1892 and 1895 respectively, Anna J. Cooper and Victoria E. Matthews use their literacy skills to make bold pronouncements in two philosophical declarations on the purposes of race literature. Both declarations provide a roadmap for types of creative, cultural, and educational advancements that could reconfigure black lives. The literary imagination is tasked with taking on this charge. This chapter demonstrates how Cooper and Matthews’s philosophical declarations posit a kind of transformational literacy practice as a discursive and practical method for real change.

  PublisherDOI

• LITERACY, THE WOMAN’S ERA, AND THE LITERARY IMAGINATION

  University Press of Mississippi eBooks · 2022-11-29

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• 3 Scepticism

  Edinburgh University Press eBooks · 2022-11-24

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Exploring relationship strategies of overweight adolescents

  2021-05-23

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Childhood obesity has been identified as a health crisis reaching epidemic proportions worldwide. Significant literature addresses the many aspects of this issue however little exists that honours the experiences and voices of overweight adolescents. Framed by relational-cultural theory, in this exploratory qualitative study, I examine experiences, strategies, and processes of overweight adolescents in relation to their interactions with others. A case study analysis of a focus group of overweight adoloescents ages 13-16 years was conducted with three salient themes emerging. Participant's verbalized experiences demonstrated a perception of issues related to their relationships with others and sometimes an identified awareness of factors pertaining to these relationships. The third theme centres on the varied and at times complex strategies participants used when navigating these potential or existing relationships with others. Implications for health promoting theory, policy, practice, and future research are outlined.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Exploring relationship strategies of overweight adolescents

  2021-05-23

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Childhood obesity has been identified as a health crisis reaching epidemic proportions worldwide. Significant literature addresses the many aspects of this issue however little exists that honours the experiences and voices of overweight adolescents. Framed by relational-cultural theory, in this exploratory qualitative study, I examine experiences, strategies, and processes of overweight adolescents in relation to their interactions with others. A case study analysis of a focus group of overweight adoloescents ages 13-16 years was conducted with three salient themes emerging. Participant's verbalized experiences demonstrated a perception of issues related to their relationships with others and sometimes an identified awareness of factors pertaining to these relationships. The third theme centres on the varied and at times complex strategies participants used when navigating these potential or existing relationships with others. Implications for health promoting theory, policy, practice, and future research are outlined.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Excerpts from “Woman Versus The Indian”

  2020-11-19

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  As leaders in the woman’s movement of today, they have need of clearness of vision as well as firmness of soul in adjusting recalcitrant forces, and wheeling into line the thousand and one none-such, never-to-be-modified, won’t-be-dictated-to banners of their somewhat mottled array. The American woman then is responsible for American manners. The American woman of to-day not only gives tone directly to her immediate world, but her tiniest pulsation ripples out and out, down and down, till the outermost circles and the deepest layers of society feel the vibrations. If the Indian has been wronged and cheated by the puissance of the American government, it is woman’s mission to plead with her country to cease to do evil and to pay its honest debts. With all her vaunted independence, the American woman of to-day is as fearful of losing caste as a Brahmin in India.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Victoria Earle Matthews

  2 shared

• Georgia Douglas Johnson

  1 shared

• Allison M. Andrews

  University of Florida

  1 shared

• Damaris Martinez

  Tel Aviv University

  1 shared

• Russell Meeuf

  1 shared

• Michelle Davis

  1 shared

• Angelica Chaparro

  1 shared

• Tien Tavu

  1 shared