Scholar - Women Also Know History

Participant Info

Keywords: 20th-century African American history, black feminism, Lorraine Hansberry, U.S. popular culture, black freedom movement

About Me: Dr. Erin D. Chapman holds an AB in History from Stanford University and a PhD in African American Studies and History from Yale University. She is a scholar of race and sexuality in U.S. culture and an historian of gender politics in the 20th century black freedom movement. Her research has been supported by the Ford Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the American Association of University Women, and the Schlesinger Library at Harvard University.

At GWU, Dr. Chapman teaches survey courses in African American history and graduate and undergraduate seminars on African American historiography, African American historical biography, the history of American slavery and its legacies, and U.S. black radicalisms.

During the 2018-19 academic year, Dr. Chapman will be an American Council of Learned Societies Fellow as she continues her research focusing on the art and activism of radical journalist and playwright Lorraine Hansberry.

Recent Publications: Dr. Chapman is the author of Prove It On Me: New Negroes, Sex, and Popular Culture in the 1920s (published by Oxford University Press in 2012) and a range of book chapters and articles. These include “Staging Gendered Radicalism at the Height of the U.S. Cold War: A Raisin in the Sun and Lorraine Hansberry’s Vision of Freedom,” published in the journal Gender & History in August of 2017 and “Rape Fantasies and Other Assaults: Black Women’s Sexuality and Racial Redemption on Film,” which is Chapter 10 in the collection Black Female Sexualities, edited by Trimiko Melancon and Joanne M. Braxton and published by Rutgers University Press in 2015.