Associate Professor of English and African American Studies

(Spring 2025)

This interpretive biography charts trailblazing Black feminist Anna Julia Cooper’s radical vision for Black women’s intellectual life and higher education.  It argues that Cooper’s contributions and insights were central to imagining a place for Black women in higher education and as intellectual leaders in the struggles for social justice and transformative change from the Reconstruction era through the dawning of the Civil Rights movement. It demonstrates how Cooper helped to build the infrastructures of Black women’s intellectual activism through her philosophical and material interventions, and it acquaints us more intimately with the personal and professional costs and consequences Cooper sustained in her battle for equal rights. Significantly, through Cooper’s life and work, we come to see and understand more deeply what it meant to navigate social and racial tensions as a Black woman intellectual and educator, and we better understand the practice of Black women’s intellectual activism at key moments in US history from slavery and Reconstruction to Jim Crow and the Civil Rights movement.