Aimee Cox facts for kids

Aimee Meredith Cox is an American cultural anthropologist, a former dancer, and a choreographer. She studies how people express themselves through movement and culture. She is a professor at Yale University, teaching anthropology and African American studies. She also teaches at Fordham University.

Aimee Cox earned her first degree in anthropology from Vassar College in 1994. Later, she received her PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Michigan in 2006.

From 2001 to 2004, Cox directed a shelter for young women in Detroit called Alternatives for Girls. While there, she did research for her PhD. She used dance, poetry, and music to help the young women express themselves creatively. In 2005, Cox started the BlackLight Project at the shelter. This project helped residents explore music and dance to share their personal stories. Cox says her time at the shelter and with the BlackLight Project inspired her book, Shapeshifters: Black Girls and Choreography of Citizenship. This book won several awards, including the 2017 book award from the Society for the Anthropology of North America. It also won the 2016 Victor Turner Book Prize.

After her research and finishing her PhD, Cox began teaching at Rutgers University–Newark. In 2009, she brought the BlackLight project to Newark with 15 young female leaders. In 2011, Cox started working at Fordham University. In 2017, she joined Yale University as a professor.

Besides her work as an anthropologist, Cox is also a talented dancer and choreographer. She performed with Ailey II and the Dance Theatre of Harlem. She also helps guide important academic journals and groups, like the Association of Black Anthropologists.

Aimee Cox's Personal Journey

Aimee Cox often talks about how her family helped her follow her dreams in school and academics. She dedicated her PhD paper and her book Shapeshifters to her sister, Jennifer. Her sister's life was full of stories from the young women Aimee met at the Detroit shelter. In her PhD paper, Cox also thanked her sister for encouraging her to write about her own experiences. This helped her understand herself better.

Aimee Cox's Education

Aimee Cox studied at Vassar College and earned a degree in anthropology in 1994. Dance was a very important part of her college life. Even though she could have graduated early in 1992, she chose to study for a semester at the Dance Theatre of Harlem (DTH). This was the first Black ballet company. While there, a main dancer named Lowell Smith encouraged her to apply to the Ailey School. She was accepted soon after. She says learning at Ailey helped her understand "how dance is about spirit, tradition, and culture." After studying at the Ailey School, Cox also got the chance to return and perform professionally.

After Vassar, Cox went on to get her PhD in cultural anthropology from the University of Michigan (1998-2006). She spent four years doing research at the homeless shelter. She wrote about these experiences in her PhD paper, "You Can Do Better!" Marginalized Black Girls and the Performance of Respectability. This paper shared and looked at the stories of the young women she met at the Detroit shelter.

Aimee Cox's Career

Before becoming a professor, Aimee Cox was a professional dancer. She toured with The Alvin Ailey Repertory Ensemble/Ailey II. She started volunteering at Alternatives for Girls in Detroit. Then, she became the director of the homeless shelter from 2002 to 2005. She wrote about her time working at the shelter in her book Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship.

From 2008 to 2011, she worked at Rutgers University–Newark. There, she continued the BlackLight Project that she began with the girls from the Detroit shelter. She also joined the African and African American Studies Department at Fordham University as a professor. Later, at Yale University, she worked in the Anthropology and African American Studies department.

Aimee Cox's Awards

In 2016, Aimee Cox's book, Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship, won the Victor Turner Book Prize. It also received an honorable mention for the Gloria E. Anzaldúa book Prize. In 2017, she was honored as the Woman of the Year by the Colorado Springs Chamber of Commerce & EDC. She also received the Malkiel Scholarship from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation in 2018. In 2021, she was one of four people to receive the Poorvu Family Fund for Academic Innovation award from Yale College.

Groups and Organizations

Aimee Cox is a fellow for the Black Atlantic Ecologies project at Columbia's Center for the Study of Social Difference. This project looks at how Black experiences can help us think about the future, especially with environmental changes. She has also been part of Black Women Artists for Black Lives Matter. This group works to highlight problems with racism. In 2019, Cox was a faculty fellow at the Center for Experimental Ethnography at the University of Pennsylvania. There, she led an interactive performance.

Aimee Cox's Written Works

Main Publications

In 2015, Cox published her first book, Shapeshifters. This book is a study of young Black women in Detroit, aged 15–22. Based on her work in a homeless shelter, Cox explores how young Black women find ways to move around social challenges. She calls this process "shapeshifting." She explains how their storytelling, physical actions, and even their appearance are ways they "shapeshift." Cox also shares the story of one family, the Brown family. Through these experiences, Cox tells a story about how young Black women seek hope and change through their actions and expressions.

Cox is currently working on a project called "Living Past Slow Death." This project will become two books. It is based on her research in different cities like Cincinnati, Ohio, and Jackson, Mississippi.

Other Publications

Cox has written several other works besides Shapeshifters. Her work, The Body and the City Project: Young Black Women Making Space, Community, and Love in Newark, New Jersey, is a study that builds on her work in Detroit. Like Shapeshifters, she explores how race, gender, social class, and location connect in the stories of women in Newark. She also contributed to Oracular Practice, Crip Bodies and the Poetry of Collaboration. She wrote a book review for two books about young women and violence for the journal Signs: Journal of Women in Culture & Society. Recently, she helped write a review of a dance performance called Fremde Tänze by Nelisiwe Xaba. She also published a work called Can Anthropology Get Free? in 2020.

About Her Writing

Aimee Cox's writing connects her studies in anthropology with her love for dance. She looks at how race, location, social class, and gender all come together through performance. Her work in Detroit has influenced many of her writings, from Shapeshifters to her other publications. She also studies performance closely, connecting her own dance experiences to others she observes. Her work aims to tell the stories of Black women. It also creates a place in academics to explore how performance and different parts of identity are linked, especially for Black women. Because her work is about real-life experiences, it often acts like a performance itself. It helps to change the way we understand Black women's stories.