Jayna Brown
Professor of Humanities and Media Studies, Pratt Institute,
Jayna Brown is Professor in the Department of Humanities and Media Studies at Pratt Institute and is the co-editor of Social Text. Her areas of knowledge and interest include black expressive cultures, film, queer of color critique, anarchism, materialism and science fiction. Her first book, Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern (Duke University Press, 2008) won Best Book awards from both the American Society for Theatre Research and the Theater Library Association. She has also published on African American race film and popular performance in various journals including The Journal of Popular Music Studies, GLQ, Social Text and Women and Performance. Her new book, Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds (Duke University Press, Spring, 2021) traces black radical utopian practice and performance, from the psychic travels of Sojourner Truth to the cosmic transmissions of Alice Coltrane and Sun Ra. A current project on terraformation, or the modification of inhabitable environments to make them livable for the human species, asks after the ethics of human habitation in this moment, for neither the scorched earth nor the burning surface of Mars can provide us with virgin soil upon which to start over.
Working Group Affiliation