COREY CAPERS
Assistant Professor of History
Email: cncapers@uic.edu
curriculum vitae (pdf)
Corey Capers teaches Colonial American, U.S., and African American History from the 17th Century to the U.S. Civil War with a particular emphasis on the intersections of the practice of race, gender, nationalism, popular (print) culture, and religion during the American Revolution and Early American Republic. His research draws on methods endemic to multiple disciplines and fields in the humanities and social sciences to examine the relationship between the making of race, popular performance (in print and the flesh), and nationalism in the northern United States between the War for American political Independence and the rise of a herrenvolk democracy.
Capers is currently revising “Public Blackness, Printed Bodies and Vernacular Governance: Racial Practice, Publicity and Citizenship in the U.S. North, 1776–1828” for publication with the University of Pennsylvania Press's series in Early American Studies. His essay “Racial Practice, Print Publicity and Order in the Early American Republic” is forthcoming in Jordan Stein and Lara Cohen, eds., Early African American Print Culture in Theory and Practice (July 2012). Dr. Capers has been a fellow at the UIC Institute for the Humanities and has received (among others) the University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship (declined) and a Provost's Academic Diversity Postdoctoral Fellowship at Cornell University. He is most proud of receiving the Shirley Bill Award for Excellence in Teaching for the 2011-2012 academic year.
Professor Capers received his B.A. in History and African American Studies at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, TX and his Masters and Ph.D. from the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz with a parenthetical in American Studies.
Publications:
Book Manuscript:
Public Blackness, Printed Bodies: Racial Practice, Print Publicity and the Struggle for Order in the Early Republican North, 1793 – 1837 (under contract with University of Pennsylvania Press, Early American Studies)
Articles:
- “Black Voices/White Print: Racial Practice, Print Publicity and Order in the Early American Republic” for Jordan Stein and Lara Cohen, eds., Early African American Print Culture in Theory and Practice (forthcoming, University of Pennsylvania Press, July 2012).
- “Racial Practice, Double Consciousness and Discipline in the Early American Republic,” (in preparation for American Quarterly).
Book Reviews:
- “Leslie Alexander, African or American?: Black Identity and Political Activism in New York City, 1784-1861” in Journal of the Early Republic, Vol. 32, no. 1 (Spring, 2012)
- “Laura Doyle, Freedom's Empire: Race and the Rise of the Novel in Atlantic Modernity, 1640-1940” in Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, Vol. 11, No. 3.
- “Visualizing Freedom, Michael A. Chaney’s Fugitive Vision: Slave Image and Black Identity in Antebellum Narrative” in Common-Place, Vol. 9, No. 4.5 (Summer, 2009).
- “Freedom, Ideology and White Supremacy: A Comment on Melvin P. Ely’s Israel on the Appomattox” in LABOR: Studies in the Working Class History of the Americas, volume 6, No. 2 (Summer, 2009).
- “Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History in Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, Vol. 7, No. 3 (Winter 2006).
Courses Taught:
- Colonial British North America
- American History to Reconstruction
- The American Revolution
- Riot, Revelry and Religion in the Early Republic
- Authority, Resistance and Power in Early America
- Ritual, Print and Politics: Cultures of Performance in the Early American Republic
- African American History to Reconstruction
- Race, Gender and the American Revolution
- A History of Punishment: From Early Modern Europe to Early America
- Race in Early America (Graduate)
- Race, Slavery and Freedom in Early America (Graduate)
- Ordering Worlds: Enacting Difference in History, Historiography and the Human Sciences (Graduate)
- History, Power and the Subject: A Foucault Seminar for Historians (Graduate)
Race, Gender and the American Revolution (Graduate)