Camille Owens
African American literature; American childrenās 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.
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 childhoodās developmental schemaāfrom child to Manāas key to naturalizing white patriarchal power, ableism, and race across the nineteenth century. Rethinking the common sense of childrenās innate dependence by identifying each systemās 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 childrenās labor and cultural production, this book recenters the history of American childhood around the question of black childrenās 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, childrenās literature, performance studies, disability studies, interdisciplinary research methods, and archival theory.
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
Books
(New York University Press, 2024)
Journal Articles
āThe 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
āāI, 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)
āāFine Discordsā: Anarranging the Archives of Philippa Schuyler,ā American Quarterly 73, no. 2 (June 2021).
- 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