Aimee Meredith Cox is a cultural anthropologist, writer, and movement artist. She is currently an associate professor in the anthropology department at New York University, following her appointment as an associate professor in the African American Studies and anthropology departments at Yale. Cox is the author of the award-winning Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship (Duke, 2015) and the editor of the volume Gender: Space (MacMillan, 2018).
Her current book project (under contract with Viking Press) explores the interlocking societal and cultural forces that contribute to the various degrees of violence that often circumscribe, but do not wholly define, the lives of Black women in the United States. The life and death of her childhood friend is the intimate lens through which this larger collective narrative is told and from which Cox dissects the concept of slow death, or the daily seemingly small acts of violence that precede the more spectacular acts of violence that garner public attention. Cox draws on her experiential knowledge of living in Cincinnati, Ohio, along with her anthropological research interest in Black girlhood and the theoretical foundation of Black feminist theory to bring this complicated story of race, gender, regional identity, violence, and resiliency to life.
Selected Work
- Cosmic Cartographies: A short video documentary which details Cox's embodied ethnographic work with an intergenerational group of Black women activists and artists as they use public performance as a way to reclaim their right to space in Cincinnati, Ohio.