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Jeanne Scheper

Assistant Professor of Women's Studies
School of Humanities

Ph.D., University of California, Santa Barbara, English Literature, 2005


Women's Studies Doctoral Emphasis Certificate, University of California, Santa Barbara, 2005


M.A., University of Maryland, College Park, English Literature, 1995


B.A., Sarah Lawrence College, Liberal Arts & Studio Arts, 1988

Phone: 949-824-6406
Fax: 949-824-6416
Email: jscheper@uci.edu

University of California
3216 Humanities Gateway
Mail Code: 2655
Irvine, CA 92697

picture of Jeanne  Scheper

Research
Interests
Feminist Performance Studies and Visual Culture; Cultural Studies; Theories of Race, Gender, & Sexuality; Trans-Atlantic Modernism
   
Academic
Distinctions
Faculty Collaborative Grant with Sheron Wray, Dance Department, "Waltzing in the Dark: Academic Inquiry into Dance of the African Diaspora (Brenda Dixon Gottschild Residency)," Humanities Center, UCI, 2009.
Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Houston, Women's Studies, 2005-2007
School of Criticism and Theory, Cornell University, with Prof. Maryse Condé, 2004.
Consortium in Literature, Theory, and Culture Dissertation Award, UCSB, 2002-2003.
Interdisciplinary Humanities Center Pre-Doctoral Fellowship, UCSB, Winter 2002.
Pearl Butler Evans Award for a Scholarly Essay in African American Literature, UCSB, 2002.
Berkeley Summer Research Institute, with Prof. Leo Bersani and Prof. Judith
Butler, 1999.
   
Research
Abstract
My research and teaching interests focus on interdisciplinary approaches to feminist visual culture and performance; trans-Atlantic modernism; and theories of race, gender, and sexuality. I have written on topics such as the politics of mobility and black female flanerie in Nella Larsen’s novel Quicksand (1928) in African American Review; the gendered rhetoric of labor debates and the importance of archives for feminist visual culture activism in Feminist Studies; and on the “diva politics” of reception or the critical recycling of 20th century stage performer Josephine Baker’s iconicity in Camera Obscura.

My current book project, "Moving Performances," analyzes the relationship of race and performance practices to the politics of mobility and subjectivity in the early twentieth century. I examine how subjects produce complexity within the limits of historical spectacularization and commodification of the racialized body. The cases I examine, including early twentieth century popular stage performers such as Aida Overton Walker and the iconic Josephine Baker, speak to the complexity of women-of-color cultural producers’ responses to the representational practices of “primitivism” and “Orientalism” and to prevailing notions of “modernity.”
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Jeanne Scheper is Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies at UC, Irvine.

For four years she served as Managing Editor of Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies.

As a member of the multi-media shadow performance group, Cave Dogs (1998-2004), she wrote the scripts for "How to Build a Raft" and "Ferrous City", which have been performed at venues such as Henry Street Settlement (NYC), PS 122 (NYC), Mobius (Boston, MA) .

She has taught classes on Feminist Theories of the Archive; Feminist Approaches to Performance Studies; Introduction to Women's Studies: Gender in a Transnational World; Gender and Modernism; Radical Women Writers of the 1930s; Women Writers of the African World.

UCI Courses Frequently Taught

Producing Gender Transnationally
Producing Feminist Knowledge
Queer Lives and Knowledges
Gender and Popular Culture
   
Publications “The New Negro Flâneuse in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand,” African American Review 42.3-4 (Fall/Winter 2008).
   
  “‘The Importance of Objective Analysis’ on Gays in the Military: A Response to Elaine Donnelly’s Constructing the Co-Ed Military,” (with Nathaniel Frank, Aaron Belkin, and Gary Gates), Duke Journal of Gender Law and Policy 15.2 (2008): 419-448.
   
  “‘Of La Baker, I am a Disciple’: The Diva Politics of Reception,” Camera Obscura 65 (2007): 72-101.
   
  “Feasting on Technologies of Recycling in the Jurassic,” Interview with David Wilson, founder of the Museum of Jurassic Technology, Los Angeles, CA. Special Issue on Cultural Recycling, Other Voices: The eJournal of Cultural Criticism, 3.1 (2007).
   
  “Visualize Academic Labor in the 1990s: Inventing an Activist Archive in Santa Barbara,” Feminist Studies 31.3 (Fall 2005): 557-569.
   
  “‘Take Black or White’: Libby Holman’s Sound,” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, 9.2.18 (1998): 95-117.
   
Other Experience Managing Editor
Camera Obscura 1998—2002

Research Director
Palm Center 2007—2008

Link to this profile http://www.faculty.uci.edu/profile.cfm?faculty_id=5581
   
Last updated 11/22/2009