Professor Jayna Brown is Chair of the Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies at Brown University. Brown is the author of two books, both published by Duke University Press: Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern (2008) and Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds (2021). She has also published numerous essays in publications including Gay and Lesbian Quarterly, South Atlantic Quarterly, and Women and Performance. Brown is co-editor of the journal Social Text and has also been a contributing journalist for NPR’s music programming. Her areas of research and specialization include speculative fictions, music, queer studies, black feminism, black diasporan intellectual history, and our changing media landscape. Her current work is located at the intersections of speculative fiction, ecology, and black expressive cultures.
Headshot of Jayna Brown