Brittney Cooper

Brittney Cooper is Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Africana Studies. Prof. Cooper is also the Principal Investigator and Founding Director of the Race and Gender Equity (RAGE) Lab at Rutgers. Her books include Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women, winner of the 2018 Merle Curti Prize for Best Book in U.S. Intellectual History from the Organization of American Historians; the New York Times bestseller Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower; Feminist AF: A Guide to Crushing Girlhood (co-authored with Susana Morris and Chanel Craft Tanner) a Kirkus top Young Adult Book of 2021 and a nominee for the Garden State Teen Book Award from the New Jersey Library Association; Stand Up!: 10 Mighty Women Who Made a Change; and The Crunk Feminist Collection (co-edited with Susana Morris and Robin Boylorn). Cooper co-founded the Crunk Feminist Collective, a Hip Hop Generation Feminist Collective of Women of Color Activists and Scholars. They ran the highly successful Crunk Feminist Collective Blog which was named a top blog by New York Magazine in 2011. Today, they co-edit The Remix, a weekly substack newsletter.

Dr. Cooper has also been awarded prizes or been a named finalist for several awards related to her digital commentary. She is currently a contributor at The Cut/New York Magazine and she is a former columnist at Salon.com, Cosmopolitan.com, and a former contributor at Time.com. Dr. Cooper frequently appears as a commentator on MSNBC and NPR, has appeared in several documentaries on Netflix and PBS, and her commentary has been published at the New York Times, the Washington Post, Ebony Magazine, Essence Magazine, Time Magazine, Marie Claire, PBS and many other outlets. In 2016, she gave a TED Talk for TED Women on "the Racial Politics of Time." To date, her talk has been viewed over 1 million times. She has been named to The Root.com's Root 100, an annual list of top Black influencers four times.

An award-winning teacher, Professor Cooper teaches courses on race, gender, and sexuality, Hip Hop, Black Intellectual History, and Black Feminist Thought. She was the 2016 recipient of the Masters Level Teaching Award from the Northeastern Association of Graduate Schools.

Publications:

• https://www.thecut.com/2022/06/white-evangelicals-dobbs-scotus-decision.html

• https://www.thecut.com/2022/05/the-children-are-no-longer-our-future.html

• https://www.thecut.com/2022/05/white-male-violence-buffalo-supermarket-shooting.html

Media Appearances/Speaking Engagements:

• Keynote Address for Cromwell Day (Honoring Oldest African American Alumna) at Smith College (November 2023)

• Guest Course Lecture on Respectability Politics at Harvard Kennedy School (November 2023)

• Guest Preacher at Rankin Memorial Chapel at Howard University

Previous Organizations: 

• University of Alabama

Accomplishments:

• My book Eloquent Rage was named in New York Times Bestseller in June 2020

• My book Beyond Respectability won the Best Book in U.S. Intellectual History Prize from the Organization of American Historians

Upcoming Projects:

• Principal Investigator of the Race and Gender Equity (RAGE) Lab at Rutgers

• How To Love A Feminist (A Book Project forthcoming with Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)

The study of Black women's role in the long Black freedom struggle anchors the core of my scholarly project, and the commitment to scholar-activism that anchors Black feminist intellectual production guides my work in the world as both an activist and an academic committed to the pursuit of race and gender justice for Black communities.

The Race and Gender Equity (RAGE Lab), founded in 2023, is a multi-modal research incubator committed to producing Black feminist research on the social thriving of Black women and girls and making that research accessible to broad public audiences. As a research and training incubator, RAGE Lab focuses on studying the variety of ways that Black feminists do their work in public. Using a mix of community conversations, digital archiving methods, oral histories of Black feminist thinkers who visit the lab, and textual analysis of Black feminist online knowledge production, researchers in the lab work to ascertain a comprehensive view of the conditions that shape contemporary Black feminist knowledge production.

https://globalracialjustice.rutgers.edu/RAGE-Lab