Jennifer DeClue

Jennifer DeClue is Associate Professor in The Program for the Study of Women and Gender at Smith College. She is a queer studies scholar who specializes in Black feminism, gender and chattel slavery, queer of color critique, film studies, popular culture, and the avant-garde. She earned her doctorate in American Studies and Ethnicity from the University of Southern California and has been teaching at Smith College since 2015. Her book Visitation: The Conjure Work of Black Feminist Avant-Garde Cinema was published with Duke University Press in the fall of 2022 and received the Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award. She was awarded an American Association of University Women Postdoctoral Fellowship as well as the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture’s Scholar-in-Residence Fellowship, in support of her research for Visitation. Her scholarship has been published in the critical anthologies:  No Tea, No Shade: New Writings in Black Queer Studies, Sisters in the Life: A History of Out African American Lesbian Media-Making, and Spectatorship: Shifting Theories of Gender, Sexuality, and Media. She has published articles on Black queer theory and popular culture in Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International, Transgender Studies Quarterly, and GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. She is currently working on her next book that contends with the competing histories of abolition and slavery, and their legacies, in the northern United States.