Jennifer DeVere Brody

Jennifer DeVere Brody holds a B.A. in Victorian Studies from Vassar College and did her graduate work in English and American Literature at the University of Pennsylvania which awarded her the Thurgood Marshall Prize for Academics and Community Service. Her scholarly essays have appeared in Theatre Journal, Signs, Genders, Callaloo, Screen, Text and Performance Quarterly and in numerous edited volumes. Her books, Impossible Purities: Blackness, Femininity and Victorian Culture (Duke University Press, 1998) and Punctuation: Art, Politics and Play (Duke University Press, 2008) both discuss relations among and between sexuality, gender, racialization, visual studies and performance. She has served as the President of the Women and Theatre Program, on the board of Women and Performance and has worked with the Ford and Mellon Foundations. She received the Monette-Horwitz Prize for Independent Research Against Homophobia, a grant from the Royal Society for Theater Research and a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship. She co-produced “The Theme is Blackness” festival of black plays in Durham, NC when she taught in African American Studies at Duke University. Her research and teaching focus on performance, aesthetics, politics and subjectivity as well as black feminist theory, queer studies and contemporary cultural studies. She co-edited, with Nicholas Boggs, the re-publication of James Baldwin’s illustrated book, Little Man, Little Man and is writing a new book about the intersections of sculpture and performance in the work of Edmonia Lewis. She held the Weinberg College of Board of Visitors Professorship at Northwestern University and was a member of Duke University's African & African American Studies Dept. for three years. She co-edited GLQ with Riley Snorton.