Camille Owens

In my work, I examine race, childhood, and ableism at their historical, cultural, and epistemic intersections. My first book, Like Children: Black Prodigy and the Measure of the Human in America (NYU Press, 2024), identifies modern childhood’s developmental schema—from child to Man—as key to naturalizing white patriarchal power, ableism, and race across the nineteenth century. Rethinking the common sense of children’s innate dependence by identifying each system’s historical dependence upon children, this book also tests another common sense: that black children have historically been excluded from childhood. Demonstrating white Americans’ immense possessive investment in black children’s labor and cultural production, this book recenters the history of American childhood around the question of black children’s value. My related research and writing on childhood, race, and disability have appeared in Disability Studies Quarterly, Early American Literature, and American Quarterly. I teach on a range of topics in black studies, African American and Indigenous literatures, children’s literature, performance studies, disability studies, interdisciplinary research methods, and archival theory.