Dr. Brittney Cooper

Dr. Brittney Cooper is Associate Professor in the Department of Africana Studies at Rutgers University, with a secondary appointment in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She is the author of Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower, published by St. Martin's Press in 2018, and Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women, an academic monograph published by University of Illinois Press in 2017 and a winner of the Modern Language Association William Sanders Scarborough Prize for outstanding scholarly study of Black American literature or culture. She is also a co-founder and the longtime managing editor of the Crunk Feminist Collective, the blog and broader intellectual community that produced The Crunk Feminist Collection edited volume in 2017.

Her doctoral training was at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro where she earned a PhD in Women's and Gender Studies. Her current scholarly agenda spans Black feminist intellectual history, contemporary Black feminist theory, and public scholarship that translates academic Black feminist thought into engagements with broader popular and political discourse.

Her mentor focus is the long arc of academic careers in Black studies, Africana studies, women's and gender studies, and adjacent humanities and interdisciplinary fields. The tenure-file preparation specifically for Black women scholars in fields where the external-letter pool requires deliberate cultivation across multiple senior scholars. The translation of academic scholarship into public writing without losing the rigor of the academic work. The discipline of writing across both registers — the monograph and the trade book, the academic article and the public essay — while teaching.

Her secondary mentor focus is the work of public scholarship as a sustainable practice. The platform decisions. The op-ed and trade-book publishing relationships. The lecture circuit. The way public-facing work interacts with departmental politics and tenure trajectories. The protection of intellectual property and authorial voice across publishing relationships.

Mentees who book with Brittney come from three primary populations. First: doctoral students and post-doctoral fellows in Black studies, Africana studies, women's and gender studies, and adjacent fields navigating the dissertation-to-first-book transition. Second: junior faculty preparing for tenure review. Third: mid-career scholars considering the transition into more substantial public-scholarship engagement.

Her style is direct. The mentor session is not a conversation about general academic ambitions; it is a conversation about the specific writing and the specific tenure file in front of the mentee. She expects mentees to arrive with drafts when drafts are the topic and with the current CV when the broader trajectory is the topic. She gives specific feedback on writing and specific advice on departmental navigation.

Outside the academic position she contributes regularly to public-scholarship venues — Cosmopolitan, Salon, Time, Essence, and the long list of platforms where her writing has appeared. She is a frequent guest on national radio and television and a regular speaker at academic and community-facing conferences. She maintains an active engagement with the Crunk Feminist Collective community.

She is a member of the Academia and Research network here as a senior member of the humanities subgroup, the Strong Black Woman Trope Deconstruction network (her work being foundational to the reading list of that network), and the Black Church and Faith Tradition network where she contributes to discussion threads on the topic of womanist theology and its intersections with Black feminist thought.

Sessions are 60 minutes. The pre-session brief is a CV and a one-page document on the specific question or draft material. For dissertation chapter or article manuscript feedback she requires a draft of no more than thirty pages submitted at least one week before the session. The session structure is loose; she works the specific material rather than a fixed agenda. Mentees leave with detailed written notes on the draft (if applicable) and a specific action list. Follow-up sessions are common for mentees in active tenure-file preparation or in the dissertation-to-first-book transition.

Her current scholarly project, building on the Beyond Respectability work, traces Black women's intellectual production across multiple generations and across multiple disciplinary homes. The project is grounded in archival research at HBCU and adjacent collections and in oral-history interviews with senior Black women scholars. The methodological discipline of the project is significant. She works with doctoral students whose own research touches on Black-women's-intellectual-history themes on the specifics of archival access, interview ethics, and the slow construction of a research program that holds up across a long arc.

On the public-scholarship work she is direct. The platforms she has chosen — Cosmopolitan, Salon, Essence, Time — reach audiences that do not necessarily encounter academic Black feminist thought through the journal-and-monograph pipeline. The decision to write across those platforms is intentional and theoretically grounded. The platforms also pay for the time of writers in ways that academic publishing does not, which is a real consideration she is candid about.

Her work with the Crunk Feminist Collective across nearly two decades represents a sustained investment in collective intellectual practice. The Collective is a model of Black feminist collaborative work that has produced essays, books, lectures, and adjacent intellectual outputs at a scale that no single scholar could achieve. Mentees considering collaborative intellectual practice find her experience particularly useful.

Her Eloquent Rage work has reached audiences well beyond the academic-Black-feminist-thought subfield. The trade-book reception has carried her into venues — talk shows, lecture circuits, broader public conversation — that have informed how she thinks about the public-scholarship-and-academic-work intersection. She is candid about what has worked at each stage and what has not.

Her engagement in the platform's Academia and Research network, the Strong Black Woman Trope Deconstruction network, and the Black Church and Faith Tradition network reflects the range of her own intellectual practice across Black-feminist-thought, respectability-politics deconstruction, and womanist-theology conversations. Her contributions to discussion threads on the topics of tenure-file preparation, public-scholarship discipline, and the long arc of academic-trade-book careers are central to the academic-community-life of the platform.

The academic-research landscape continues to evolve in ways that affect Black and African women scholars specifically. The tenure-and-promotion structural conditions, the publication-venue politics, the funding landscape, and the institutional-service expectations all contribute to the long-arc career-trajectory questions that mentees bring to the mentor practice. The mentor practice connects specifically to the senior-level career-progression questions and to the long-arc structural conditions of the academic profession.

The platform's mentor infrastructure is designed to support the kind of long-arc mentorship that African and African-diaspora women have historically had to build informally across years and decades. The structured booking, the prepared briefs, the in-session discipline, and the post-session follow-up documentation make the mentor exchange durable in a way that informal conversations across career-arc moments often are not. Mentees who engage with the structure benefit from the discipline; the mentor practice benefits from the structure too because it permits sustained engagement across many mentees without the time-overhead of informal arrangement.