Camille Owens
African American literature; American children’s literature; theories of Blackness and indigeneity; disability studies; archival methods; Black feminisms; Black literatures and performance; history of childhood;
nineteenth-century U.S.
In my work, I examine race, childhood, and ableism at their historical, cultural, and epistemic intersections. My first book, (NYU Press, 2024), identifies modern childhood’s developmental schema—from child to Man—as key to naturalizing white patriarchal power, ableism, and race across the nineteenth century. Rethinking the common sense of children’s innate dependence by identifying each system’s historical dependence upon children, this book also tests another common sense: that black children have historically been excluded from childhood. Demonstrating white Americans’ immense possessive investment in black children’s labor and cultural production, this book recenters the history of American childhood around the question of black children’s value. My related research and writing on childhood, race, and disability have appeared in Disability Studies Quarterly,Early American Literature, and American Quarterly. I teach on a range of topics in black studies, African American and Indigenous literatures, children’s 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
“The Keller Plantation and the Racial Plot of Disability History in the U.S.,” Disability Studies Quarterly, Special Issue on Origins, Objects, and Orientations (Fall 2023)
“‘I, Young in Life’: Phillis Wheatley and the Invention of American Childhood,” Early American Literature 57, no. 3 Special Issue on Phillis Wheatley Peters (Winter 2022)
“‘Fine Discords’: Anarranging the Archives of Philippa Schuyler,” 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