Book Launch - Camille Owens

Like Children: Black Prodigy and the Measure of the Human in America

October 10, 5-7 PM
Thomson House
3650 McTavish
McGill University

The Department of English has invited Professor Amber Jamilla Musser (City University of New York) to engage in a dialogue with Assistant Professor Camille Owens.

Camille Owens is an assistant professor of English at McGill University. Owens researches and writes on American childhood, race, and disability. At McGill, she teaches courses on a range of topics in black studies, African American and Indigenous literatures, children’s literature, interdisciplinary research methods, and archival theory.

Like Children (New York University Press, 2024) is a history of American childhood that rethinks black children’s excluded status, demonstrating instead white Americans’ possessive investment in black children's value and the violence of humanist inclusion.

Amber Jamilla Musser is Professor of English at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She writes and researches at the intersections of race, sexuality, and aesthetics. Musser is the author of Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism (NYU Press, 2014), Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance (NYU Press, 2018), and Between Shadows and Noise: Sensation, Situatedness, and the Undisciplined (Duke University Press, 2024).