Kimberly Juanita Brown

My research and teaching gather at the intersection of African American/African diaspora literature and visual culture studies. In particular, I am interested in the relationship between visuality and black subjectivity. My first book, The Repeating Body: Slavery's Visual Resonance in the Contemporary (Duke University Press, 2015) examines slavery's profound ocular construction and the presence and absence of seeing in relation to the plantation space. I am currently at work on my second book, tentatively titled "Mortevivum: Photography and the Politics of the Visual." This project examines images of the dead in the New York Times in 1994 from four overlapping geographies: South Africa, Rwanda, Sudan and Haiti. "Mortevivum" explores the relationship between photography and histories of antiblackness on the cusp of the twenty-first century.