Janell Hobson

Biography

Hobson has devoted her research, teaching, and service to multiracial and transnational feminist issues in the discipline. Hobson is the author of Venus in the Dark: Blackness and Beauty in Popular Culture (Routledge, 2005) and Body as Evidence: Mediating Race, Globalizing Gender (SUNY Press, 2012). She has also co-edited an anthology, with Ime A. S. Kerlee, titled Are All the Women Still White? Globalizing Women's Studies. Hobson's research involves an oral history project on women in the Anglophone Caribbean (specifically Nevis and its diaspora). She uses a transnational lens to highlight women's iconography and experiences in global or black diasporic perspective. Hobson also writes and blogs for Ms. Magazine and authored two cover stories for the magazine: “Beyoncé’s Fierce Feminism” (Spring 2013) and “Storyteller: A Ms. Conversation with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie” (Summer 2014).

Research Interest

Women's studies; race relations; gender relations; black history month; women's history month; film; media; popular culture