Department of History
801 22nd Street, NW, Suite 335
Washington, DC 20052

Phone: (202) 994-6230
Fax: (202) 994-6231

history@gwu.edu
Erin Chapman

Erin  D.  Chapman

Title — Assistant Professor of History

Address — 801 22nd St. NW #309, Washington D.C. 20052

Office — 309 Phillips Hall

E-mail — echapman@gwu.edu

Areas of Expertise —

African American history, U.S. race and gender history, history of U.S. popular culture.

Current Research

Erin D. Chapman is a historian of U.S. race politics, African American cultural expression, U.S. gender politics, and racialized popular culture. Her first book manuscript, Prove It On Me: New Negroes, Sex, and Popular Culture in the 1920s, is a history of the cultural investment in African American women’s images and bodies that pervaded U.S. society in the midst of transformations in race politics, sexual mores, and popular culture that defined the New Negro era of the early twentieth century. Her second book-length project, Fighting the World: African American Women and the Gender Politics of Racial Advancement, 1830-1980, will analyze the long history of gender politics operating within African American racial advancement ideologies and the praxis African American women developed at certain historical junctures to address combined racism and sexism. Her research has been supported by the Ford Foundation, the Mellon Foundation and the American Association of University Women Educational Foundation, among others.  (Complete C.V.)

Education

Ph.D., Yale University, 2006.

Publications

Prove It On Me: New Negroes, Sex, and Popular Culture in the 1920s (Oxford University Press, 2012).

“Prove It On Me: The New Negro Woman in the Sex-Race Marketplace.” Maroon: The Yale Journal of African American Studies 1:1 (Spring 2006): 63-86.

“Reverse Colorism and the Politics of Black Class and Gender Representation in Soul Food.” Black Arts Quarterly, 4:1 (Winter/Spring 1999): 12-15.

Classes Taught

3360: African American History to 1865

3361: African American History since 1865

3362: African American Women's History

2350: Race and Gender in the New Negro Era

6001: African American Historiography

Periodically:

30001: American Slavery and Its Legacies

30001: U.S. Black Feminisms 1830-1990

30001: Race in U.S. Popular Film