Ā鶹AV

Camille Owens

Camille Owens
Contact Information
Email address: 
camille.owens [at] mcgill.ca
Address: 

Arts 370
McCall MacBain Arts Building
853 Sherbrooke Street West
Montreal, QC H3A 0G5
Canada

Group: 
Faculty Members
Position: 
Assistant Professor
Stream: 
Literature
Cultural Studies
Specialization by geographical area: 
United States
Specialization by time period: 
19th-Century
20th-Century
Modernism
Area(s): 
Archives & Bibliography
Book History
Creative Practice & Performance Studies
Fiction
Identity & Representation
Post/Anti/Decolonial Studies
Areas of interest: 

African American literature; American childrenā€™s literature; theories of Blackness and indigeneity; disability studies; archival methods; Black feminisms;Ā Black literatures and performance;Ā history of childhood;Ā 
nineteenth-century U.S.

Biography: 

In my work, I examine race, childhood, and ableism at their historical, cultural, and epistemic intersections. My first book,ĢżĀ (NYU Press, 2024), identifies modern childhoodā€™s developmental schemaā€”from child to Manā€”as key to naturalizing white patriarchal power, ableism, and race across the nineteenth century. Rethinking the common sense of childrenā€™s innate dependence by identifying each systemā€™s historical dependenceĀ uponĀ children, this book also tests another common sense: that black children have historically been excluded from childhood. Demonstrating white Americansā€™ immense possessive investment in black childrenā€™s labor and cultural production, this book recenters the history of American childhood around the question of black childrenā€™s value. My related research and writing on childhood, race, and disability have appeared inĀ Disability Studies Quarterly,ĢżEarly American Literature, andĀ American Quarterly. I teach on a range of topics in black studies, African American and Indigenous literatures, childrenā€™s literature, performance studies, disability studies, interdisciplinary research methods, and archival theory.

Degree(s): 

M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D., Yale University, African American Studies and American Studies
B.A., summa cum laude, Harvard University, History & Literature and WGS

Selected publications: 

Books

(New York University Press, 2024)

Journal Articles

ā€œThe Keller Plantation and the Racial Plot of Disability History in the U.S.,ā€ Disability Studies Quarterly, Special Issue on Origins, Objects, and Orientations (Fall 2023)Ā 

ā€œā€˜I, Young in Lifeā€™: Phillis Wheatley and the Invention of American Childhood,ā€ Early American Literature 57, no. 3 Special Issue on Phillis Wheatley Peters (Winter 2022)

ā€œā€˜Fine Discordsā€™: Anarranging the Archives of Philippa Schuyler,ā€ American Quarterly 73, no. 2 (June 2021).

Awards, honours, and fellowships: 
  • Junior Fellow, Harvard Society of Fellows, 2020-2023
  • 1921 Prize in American Literature, American Literature Society, 2022
  • Ralph Henry Gabriel Dissertation Prize, American Studies Association, 2020
  • Sylvia Ardyn Boone Dissertation Prize, Yale University, 2020
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