Janell Hobson is Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University at Albany, State University of New York. She is the author of When God Lost Her Tongue: Historical Consciousness and the Black Feminist Imagination (Routledge, 2021), Venus in the Dark: Blackness and Beauty in Popular Culture (Routledge, 2005, 2nd ed. 2018), and Body as Evidence: Mediating Race, Globalizing Gender (SUNY Press, 2012). She also writes for Ms. Magazine and has authored several cover stories for the magazine, including “Beyoncé’s Fierce Feminism” (Spring 2013). She also writes for other online publications and engages in public scholarship. Hobson also edited two volumes, The Routledge Companion to Black Women’s Cultural Histories (Routledge, 2021) and Are All the Women Still White? Rethinking Race, Expanding Feminisms (SUNY Press, 2016). She is the Routledge book series editor of “Subversive Histories, Feminist Futures.”
jh-photoHobson is the Community Fellow for 2021-2022 at the University at Albany’s Institute for History and Public Engagement, which supports her guest-editing of the Harriet Tubman Bicentennial Project with Ms. Magazine for Tubman’s 200th anniversary birthday. This project is a continuation of Hobson’s scholarship on Harriet Tubman (ca.1822-1913), who is the subject of a special issue that she guest edited with Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism (vol. 12, no. 2, 2014), is the focus of chapter 4 in When God Lost Her Tongue, and the featured story of a short animated script commissioned and posted on YouTube in 2018 by TED Ed Lessons Worth Sharing
