Nicole R. Fleetwood

Nicole R. Fleetwood’s research and teaching interests are visual culture, photography, black cultural history, gender and feminist studies, creative nonfiction, and cultural works that address poverty and social inequality. She is the author of two books: Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness, which was the recipient of the 2012 Lora Romero First Book Publication Prize of the American Studies Association, and On Racial Icons: Blackness and the Public Imagination (Rutgers University Press, 2015).  Her articles appear in African American Review, American Quarterly, Aperture, Callaloo: Art and Culture in the African Diaspora, Public Culture, Signs, Social Text, tdr: the journal of performance studies, and edited anthologies. Fleetwood received her Ph.D. from Stanford University in the Program in Modern Thought and Literature and her B.Phil. from the School of Interdisciplinary Studies at Miami University (Ohio).  She is the recipient of fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, Schomburg Center for Research on Black Culture, and the Whiting Foundation. Fleetwood is completing her third book, Marking Time: Prison Art and Public Culture, a study of visual art in the era of mass incarceration. Recently, she collaborated with Aperture Foundation on Prison Nation—an exhibition of prison photography, a special issue of the magazine, and a six-part public engagement series. In 2014, she co-organized “Marking Time: Prison Art and Activism,” a conference and exhibition with the Institute for Research on Women at Rutgers.