In this virtual program, Camille Owens draws from her book, Like Children: Black Prodigy and the Measure of the Human in America (2024) and nineteenth-century archives to present new insights into Black childhood. Highlighting examples of Black children’s performances, cultural representations, and labor in the 1800s, Owens illustrates how Black children were used in the construction of white childhood, in the empowerment of white men, and in the measure of the human—and explores what it means for the study of American childhood to recognize Black children at its center.
Camille Owens is an assistant professor of English at McGill University, and works at the intersection of Black studies, disability studies, and the history of American childhood. She is the author of Like Children: Black Prodigy and the Measure of the Human in America (NYU Press, 2024) and has published essays in American Quarterly, Early American Literature, and Disability Studies Quarterly. She received her Ph.D. in American Studies and African American Studies from Yale University in 2020 and held a junior fellowship at the Harvard Society of Fellows from 2020 to 2023. Owens held a Justin G. Schiller Fellowship at AAS in 2018-19.