Brittney Cooper

About

Brittney Cooper is an Associate Professor of Women's and Gender Studies and Africana Studies. She received her Ph.D. in American Studies from the Graduate Institute of Liberal Arts at Emory University in 2009, along with an M.A. from Emory in 2007. She also holds bachelor's degrees in English and Political Science from Howard University, earned in 2002. Her work focuses extensively on Black women's intellectual history, Black feminist thought, and race and gender politics in hip hop and popular culture. She is currently completing her first book, Race Women: Gender and the Making of a Black Public Intellectual Tradition, 1892-Present. Cooper has published articles on hip hop feminism and has contributed book chapters on Black women's history in fraternal orders and the Janet Jackson Super Bowl incident. She is also a co-founder of the Crunk Feminist Collective blog, which has been recognized as a top feminist and race blog.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Linguistics
• Psychology
• Artificial Intelligence
• Natural Language Processing
• Mathematics education
• Medicine
• Developmental psychology
• Communication

Selected publications

• Beyond Respectability

  University of Illinois Press eBooks · 2017-05-15 · 342 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  In the late nineteenth century, a group of publicly active African American women emerged from the social and educational elite to assume racial leadership roles. Their work challenged thinking on racial issues as well as questions about gender, sexuality, and class. <italic>Beyond Respectability</italic> charts the development of African American women as public intellectuals and the evolution of their thought from the end of the 1800s through the Black Power era of the 1970s. Eschewing the Gre…

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• Intersectionality

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2015-08-06 · 143 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, the term intersectionality has become the key analytic framework through which feminist scholars in various fields talk about the structural identities of race, class, gender, and sexuality. This chapter situates intersectionality within a long history of black feminist theorizing about interlocking systems of power and oppression, arguing that intersectionality is not an account of personal identity but one of power. It challenges feminist theorists…

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• The Crunk Feminist Collection

  Project Muse (Johns Hopkins University) · 2017-01-01 · 84 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
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• How Sarah Got Her Groove Back, or Notes Toward a Black Feminist Theology of Pleasure

  Black Theology · 2018-07-11 · 31 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This article takes up the pivotal question that Sarah asks upon learning that she and Abraham are to have a child of their own: “After I am waxed old, shall I have pleasure?” (Genesis 18:12) This question indicates that Sarah prioritized pleasure, desired it, and asked questions of herself and of God in order to make space to receive it. For Black women who are looking for biblical precedent to prioritize pleasure, Sarah’s question provides a textual and theological invitation to explore what a…

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• Introduction: M4Bl and the Critical Matter of Black Lives

  Biography · 2018-01-01 · 6 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  As the most recent iteration of Black freedom struggles in the United States, what is the story of the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL)? This special issue is interested both in the political life of the M4BL and in the stories of those who made this movement possible. We are interested in the critical moment of encounter, when because someone's life was taken, a community's life, an activist's life, or our collective lives changed. From representations of maternal, familial, or communal grief to…

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Frequent coauthors

• Gloria Soto

  San Francisco State University

  5 shared

• Susana M. Morris

  4 shared

• Treva B. Lindsey

  3 shared

• Aisha Durham

  University of South Florida

  3 shared

• Esther Armah

  2 shared

• Michael Clarke

  San Francisco State University

  2 shared

• Joan Morgan

  New York University Press

  2 shared

• Kaila Adia Story

  2 shared

Labs

• Black Ecologies LabPI

Education

• Ph.D., American Studies

  Graduate Institute of Liberal Arts at Emory University

  2009

• M.A.

  Emory University

  2007

• B.A., English and Political Science

  Howard University

  2002

Similar researchers at Rutgers University

• Kim D. Butlerh-11
• Noura Erakath-10
• Edward Ramsamyh-5