JOINED THE DEPARTMENT
2020
BIO
Bryan Cooper Owens is a Ph.D. student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He is the former interim Director of the Queens College Africana Studies program and served as a lecturer in the Department of History there. He also taught African American History and Studies at the University of Mississippi. Cooper Owens’ research interests are African and Diasporic African history in both the pre-colonial and modern eras. In looking at both continental and Diasporic African communities he is keenly interested in the phenomena of African retentions and the specific ways that African aesthetics and cultural ideas become transformed when exposed to new environments and paradigms.
Prior to attending UNL, he earned an M.A. in African Studies (Anthropology concentration) from UCLA. Before this, Cooper Owens attended Clark Atlanta University and obtained his first M.A. degree in African American Studies (History concentration). His first M.A. thesis is titled “‘Know Your History’: J. A. Rogers, Vindicationist History, and the Use of Black Images.” It focuses on the use of art within African American vindicationist and Afrocentric history. His second thesis, “‘Artists of the Green Sahara’: Early Holocene Saharan Parietal Art as a Tool of Interpretation Within the Archaeological Record,” focuses on the history of the interpretation of African rock art within archaeological and historical records. A native West Virginian and proud “Affrilachian,” Bryan Cooper Owens earned his B.A. in Anthropology at West Virginia University.
PUBLICATIONS
- Cooper Owens, E. Bryan. “Racebending and Representation in Comic Books” Black Perspectives – African American Intellectual History Society https://www.aaihs.org/racebending-and-representation-in-comic-books/, (2017)