Professor Brown researches performance and culture in the U.S. and elsewhere in the Diaspora, with a focus on vernacular expressive forms and the body. She earned her Ph.D. at Yale University's African American Studies Department, and she was awarded dissertation and postdoctoral Ford Foundation Fellowships as well as a Rockefeller Award for the Study of Black Culture at the Stanford Humanities Center. Her book, Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern (Duke University Press, 2008) won both the Errol Hill best book award from the American Society for Theatre Research and the George Freedley award from the Theater Library Association. Her classes at UCR include: African American Women Intellectuals and Artists, Race and Performance and African American Literature. Her current projects focus on race, technology, and utopias in speculative fiction and global pop music and black women and postpunk music in Britain.