Aimee Meredith Cox In Conversation

Aimee Meredith Cox discusses her work as a scholar and dancer, and speaks about her book Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship (Duke, 2015), which "explores how young Black women in a Detroit homeless shelter contest stereotypes, critique their status as partial citizens, and negotiate poverty, racism, and gender violence to create and imagine lives for themselves," detailing years of fieldwork. Dr. Cox will be in conversation with Performance Studies students, moderated by faculty member Malik Gaines. 

Aimee Meredith Cox is a cultural anthropologist and tenured professor of African and African American Studies at Fordham University. She received her PhD in Anthropology from the University of Michigan where she also held a postdoctoral fellowship with the Center for the Education of Women. Dr. Cox’s first book is Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship (Duke University Press, 2015). She is on the editorial board of The Feminist Wire and on the founding editorial board of Public: A Journal of Imagining America. She is also an executive board member of the Association of Black Anthropologists and former co-editor of Transforming Anthropology, the peer-reviewed journal of the ABA.

Dr. Cox trained on scholarship with the Dance Theatre of Harlem, toured extensively as a professional dancer with the Alvin Ailey Repertory Ensemble/Ailey II, and is the founder of The BlackLight Project, a youth-led arts activist organization that operates in Detroit, MI, Newark, NJ and Brooklyn, NY. Dr. Cox was a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow and 2013-2014 Visiting Professor in New York University’s Anthropology Department. She is currently working on two new book projects: the first on the ethnographic legacy of anthropology and dance pioneer, Katherine Dunham, and the second on the connection between embodied healing practices, collective identity, and community transformations in New York City.