Aimee Meredith Cox

Associate Professor of Anthropology

Areas of Research/Interest

Urban and rural United States, performance ethnography; dance studies; critical race theory; embodiment and spatiality; youth cultural production; longitudinal ethnography.

Biography

Aimee Meredith Cox is a critical ethnographer, writer, and movement artist. She is the author of Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship (Duke 2015) and editor of Gender: Space (MacMillan 2018). Cox has performed and toured internationally with Ailey II and the Dance Theatre of Harlem and has choreographed performances as interventions in public and private space in Newark, Philadelphia, and Brooklyn. Cox is also a yogi of many decades. Yoga is integral to her praxis and her overall research and pedagogical commitments. Cox leads yoga teacher trainings as well as advanced study and continuing education workshops around the globe. She is currently at work on two book projects and a performance ethnographic intervention based on research among Black communities in Cincinnati, Ohio. This overall project is called “Living Past Slow Death.” Shapeshifters earned the 2016 Victor Turner Book Prize in Ethnographic Writing, and an Honorable Mention from the 2016 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Prize, as well as the 2017 Book award from the Society for the Anthropology of North America. Cox was a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow, a recipient of the Nancy Weiss Malkiel Award, and has served as the Virginia C. Gildersleeve Professorship from Barnard College.

Education

BA Anthropology Vassar College (1994); MA Anthropology University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (2002); PhD Anthropology University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (2006).

Grants/Fellowships/Honors

  • 2019 Visiting Fellow, The Center for Experimental Ethnography, University of Pennsylvania
  • 2018-19 The 2018 Nancy Weiss Malkiel Scholars Award, Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation
  • 2017-18 Virginia C. Gildersleeve Professorship Lecture Series, Barnard College
  • 2013-14 Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship
  • 2013 Dean’s Funding Award, BodyVOX! Performance Project, Fordham University
  • 2011 First Year Faculty Funding Award, Fordham University
  • 2010 Ford Foundation Secondary Education and Racial Justice Collaboration Grant
  • 2010 The State of New Jersey School Improvement Grant (SIG) for development of social justice arts model for Central High School using The BlackLight Project curriculum
  • 2009 School for Advanced Research (SAR), Advanced Seminar Grant Katherine Dunham and the Anthropology of Dance
  • 2009 National Council for Black Studies – Cutting Edge Gender Research Grant - The Body and/in the City: Black Women in Newark Redefine Public Space
  • 2008 Institute for Research on Women seminar on “Gendered Agency” Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ
  • 2007 First Annual Vera Green Publishing Award Association for Black Anthropologists, American Anthropological Association
  • 2007 National Center for Institutional Diversity, Center Award Diversity Conversations, University of Michigan
  • 2004 W. K. Kellogg Foundation Grant, Youth Holistic Health Initiative

Selected Publications

  • 2021 “Cosmic Cartographies: Mapping Race and Gender in Cincinnati, Ohio.”
    EcoSomatics. Special Issue. Journal of the Center for Sustainable Practices in the Arts. 31. Winter 2021: 55-67.
  • 2020 “The Sieve, Reflections on Nelisiwe Xaba’s Fremde Tänze I”
    TDR/The Drama Review 64:2: 73-75.
  • 2018 [Editor] "Gender: Space."
    (MacMillan-Gale Cengage Learning)
  • 2015 "Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship."
    Duke University Press.
  • 2015 “The Choreography of Survival.”
    Arts: The Arts in Religious and Theological Studies 26.2: 15-19.
  • 2014 “The Body and the City Project: Young Black Women Making Space, Community, and Love in Newark, New Jersey.”
    Feminist Formations 26. 3: 1-28.
  • 2009 “The BlackLight Project: Young Black Women In Detroit Perform Through and Against the Boundaries of Anthropology.”
    Transforming Anthropology. 17.1: 52-66.
  • 2009 “Thugs, Black Divas and Gendered Aspirations.”
    Souls, A Critical Journal of Black Politics Culture and Society. Special Issue: Critical Examination of Race, Sexuality and Gender 11. 2: 113-141.
  • 2008 [With Kuppers, Petra J. Ferris, J. Gray, A. Kafer, N. Marcus, N. Simonjhell, L. Steichman, and S. Wilcox] “Oracular Practice, Crip Bodies and the Poetry of Collaboration.”
    About Performance 8: 67-89.
  • 2008 “With Anarcha: A Meditative Diary on Personal Healing and Touching History Through Performance Praxis.”
    Liminalities 4.2: 1-19.