Aimee Meredith Cox

Aimee Meredith Cox is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and African American Studies at Yale University. Her research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of Anthropology, Black Studies, and Performance Studies. Cox’s first monograph, Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship (Duke 2015), won the 2017 book award from the Society for the Anthropology of North America, a 2016 Victor Turner Book Prize in Ethnographic Writing, and Honorable Mention from the 2016 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Prize. She is also the editor of the volume, Gender: Space(MacMillan, 2018). Aimee is a dancer and choreographer. She 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. Her most recent work, based on interviews with long time activists in Cincinnati, engaged hundreds of residents in a performance ritual as part of her research in that city for an ethnography entitled Living Past Slow Death. An accomplished yogi who teaches master classes internationally, Aimee has led several yoga retreats and teacher trainings. Her experience in this realm is the basis for her next ethnographic exploration. This project considers the intersection of race, what she calls, ‘spiritual theater’, and performances of healing and recovery within the context of rapidly gentrifying Brooklyn.