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.

My research focuses on intermedial studies and the politics of aesthetics in literature, visual art, and music. I am particularly interested in the creation and reform of cultural-political spaces – such as the theatre, the public press, and the museum – and how these spaces are influenced by notions of representation, history, emancipation, sovereignty, and partisanship. Prioritizing a multidisciplinary approach, my projects span the human and social sciences as well as bioethics and seek to understand how and why art and politics collide. Special areas of interest include: theories and practices of intermediality; the philosophy of Jacques Rancière; interwar cultural diplomacy; early modern and modernist art, music, and literature; opera studies. Before joining the University of Montreal in 2019, I was Assistant Professor at the University of Victoria.