Emily Hawk, Ph.D.

I am a twentieth-century U.S. cultural historian whose work examines Black modern dance as a form of public intellectual and political life.

I study how Black choreographers such as Alvin Ailey, Geoffrey Holder, Eleo Pomare, and Carole Johnson intervened in debates over race, cultural identity, and civic engagement by performing beyond conventional theatrical settings and reaching audiences nationwide. Working from company papers, grant proposals, audience correspondence, oral histories, and state and foundation records, I argue that Black modern dance functioned not simply as aesthetic expression but as a rigorous mode of civic thought and action in twentieth-century America.

Articles from this research appear in the Journal of Urban History and the Journal of American Culture and are forthcoming in Dance Chronicle and the Journal of African American History. This research has earned competitive support from the Rockefeller Archive Center, the Smithsonian Institution, Emory University, and the Society for U.S. Intellectual History. In 2025-26 I will hold the Library of Congress Kluge Fellowship to complete the manuscript.

Committed to public scholarship, I write for Picturing Black History, the Gotham blog, and Mapping Inequality, and have presented talks for the New York Public Library, 92NY, and the National Museum of American History.

After completing my Ph.D. in U.S. History at Columbia, I served as a postdoctoral research associate in African American Studies at Princeton. In 2025-26 I will be a Visiting Assistant Professor at Dickinson College and teach a modern U.S. history seminar at the University of Pennsylvania.