From a very early age, Jennifer Brody was curious about the intersection of art, gender and race. She recalls a time as a young girl when she drew a picture of herself and colored her skin in brown.
"I told my mother that was the color I really was, even though she couldn't see it," says the fair-skinned Brody, the newest member of Duke's African and African American Studies department. "As a young child, I had a conscious perception of how I might move through the world and what kinds of limitations and possibilities my specific location might engender."
Growing up as the daughter of professors in Princeton, N.J., Brody is no stranger to academe and often found ways to blend her interests in art and scholarly research. At age 8, she was the youngest docent at the Historical Society of Princeton. She almost became a professional dancer but "loved school more."
After graduating with a degree in Victorian studies from Vassar College, Brody pursued a Ph.D. in English. Soon after, she discovered a love for teaching. Her first academic position was at the University of California, Riverside, as the first black faculty member in the English department.
"With the rise of interdisciplinarity in the ‘80s when I was in college, it was a perfect rubric for me to find something capacious enough to meld my personal passions with my intellectual ones. In fact, I don't really make the distinction [between the two]," she says of the start of her scholarly career.
After faculty positions at the University of Illinois, Chicago, and George Washington and Northwestern universities, Brody found her niche in an interdisciplinary field known as performance studies.
Her first book looked at representations of ethnicity, sexuality, gender and race in Victorian-era novels, plays and paintings. In her most recent book, Punctuation: Art, Politics and Play, published by Duke University Press last spring, she examines the use of punctuation in relation to aesthetics and experimental art.
"Working in performance, we think about how different punctuation marks could mediate our understanding of various issues," she says, referring to how use of the hyphen in terms like ‘African-American' intercedes between notions of assimilation and separatism by highlighting the dual identity of blacks in America.
At Duke, Brody is conducting a senior seminar on Atlantic studies, which examines the cross-Atlantic flow of people, culture, goods and capital.
She is also teaching a class on black independent cinema in London, New York and Los Angeles from 1970 to the present. She said she has found that Duke serves as a venue for films that may not otherwise have an audience and the university helps meet an unmet academic and cultural need, a fact that attracted her.
Brody says the university's support for faculty life both on and off campus, as well as its support for interdisciplinary collaboration -- essential for someone with Brody's varied scholarly interests -- made the decision to come to Duke especially appealing.
She notes that her primary department of African and African American Studies includes faculty from political science, literature and cultural anthropology.
In addition to getting involved with cross-campus arts collaborations, campus growth initiatives and arts projects in the greater Triangle area, Brody has a number of other projects she hopes to undertake while at Duke.
She is currently working on a research project about 19th century artist Edmonia Lewis, the first black and Native American woman to gain fame and recognition as a sculptor. She is also interested in republishing interviews by black writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin, and bringing black choreographer and dancer Bill T. Jones' autobiography, Last Night on Earth, back into print.
"So much of critical work is also autobiographical in a way," Brody says. "I think of my work as moving towards unmasking, in some sense, crucial questions in the Atlantic world."