Rochelle Rowe

I am a cultural historian whose work focuses on race, gender, and the body. I am currently researching 'Performative Blackness and Black Histories in Scotland, 1839-1939' in partnership with Scottish cultural and heritage institutions. This project is supported by an AHRC Catalyst Grant award. It examines how blackness was performed by white and black entertainers in Scotland in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, primarily in popular theatre and music hall, and by extension in the circus, human exhibitions, jazz, and local festivities. I also research the lives and labours of Black art models in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and have two publications in the pipelines from this line of research. The first is titled, 'Beauty, Ugliness, and Ideas of Difference Sara Baartman, Fanny Eaton, and Black Women’s Performance of Beauty in the Nineteenth-Century City' and will be published in the Cultural History of Beauty with Bloomsbury Academic. The second titled 'The Negro Type of Beauty': Black Modernist Muses in Jacob Epstein's Art' is in press with the Women's History Review. I also write about themes of race, gender and beauty in Black British print culture. A chapter on the politics of beauty in the Black British press is in press with Routledge as part of a reader in Gender in the Caribbean.