Daphne A. Brooks

Daphne Brooks is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Black Studies, American Studies, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Music at Yale University. She is also the Co-founder and Director of the Yale University Black Sound and the Archive Working Group.

Brooks's writing on race, gender, performance and popular music has appeared in numerous journalistic outlets, including the The New York Times, The Guardian, The Nation, and Pitchfork; as well as literary and scholarly publications such as Amerikastudien, Callaloo, Meridians, and The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative. She has published two books: Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850-1910 (Duke University Press, 2006) and Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound (Harvard University Press, 2021), which garnered multiple awards, including the Museum of African American History Stone Book Award and the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Nonfiction.

Brooks has received the New York Public Library Cullman Center Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Council of Learned Societies Postdoctoral Fellowship, a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship, a Harvard DuBois Institute Fellowship and a University of California Presidential Postdoctoral Fellowship.

She received a B.A. in English from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Los Angeles.