Erin D. Chapman

Erin D. Chapman is a historian of U.S. race politics, African American cultural expression, U.S. gender politics, and racialized popular culture. Her first book manuscript, Prove It On Me: New Negroes, Sex, and Popular Culture in the 1920s, is a history of the cultural investment in African American women’s images and bodies that pervaded U.S. society in the midst of transformations in race politics, sexual mores, and popular culture that defined the New Negro era of the early twentieth century. Her second book-length project, Fighting the World: African American Women and the Gender Politics of Racial Advancement, 1830-1980, will analyze the long history of gender politics operating within African American racial advancement ideologies and the praxis African American women developed at certain historical junctures to address combined racism and sexism. Professor Chapman is currently a Ford Foundation Diversity Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for African American Studies at Princeton University. Her research has also been supported by the Mellon Foundation and the American Association of University Women Educational Foundation, among others. She will join the History faculty at GW in the Fall of 2010. (Complete C.V.)

Selected Publications

“Prove It On Me: The New Negro Woman in the Sex-Race Marketplace.” Maroon: The Yale Journal of African American Studies 1:1 (Spring 2006): 63-86.

“Reverse Colorism and the Politics of Black Class and Gender Representation in Soul Food.” Black Arts Quarterly, 4:1 (Winter/Spring 1999): 12-15.

Courses Taught

Hist 101: African American History to Emancipation
Hist 173: African American History since Emancipation
Hist 185: African American Women’s History
Hist 297: “We Would Have to Fight the World”: Readings in U.S. Black Feminism, 1830-2000
Hist 297: Cultural Methodologies in African American History

Education

Ph.D., Yale University, 2006.