Emily Hawk, Ph.D.

I am an intellectual and cultural historian of the modern United States whose work examines modern dance as a form of political thought, civic engagement, and community building.

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.

My first book, Embodying the Movement: Black Modern Dance, Civic Education, and Community Engagement, presents the first history of Black concert dance within the Civil Rights and Black Arts Movements, revealing how African American choreographers used performance to reshape public discourse on race, identity, and belonging. The manuscript is under contract with the University of North Carolina Press. Peer-reviewed articles from this research appear in the Journal of African American History, Journal of Urban History, and Dance Chronicle, and my article on New York City's Dancemobile program received the Sally Banes Prize for Best Article from the American Society for Theatre Research. This work has earned competitive fellowships and awards from the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution, the Rockefeller Archive Center, Emory University, the New York State Archives, and the Society for U.S. Intellectual History.

My second book project, We Can Dance About It, will examine how dance educators at HBCUs cultivated cultural pride and civic responsibility among generations of students while building diverse audiences for Black art across the American South.

I have also written for The Carryall, 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 am a Visiting Assistant Professor at Dickinson College and am teaching a modern U.S. history seminar at the University of Pennsylvania. In Fall 2026, I will join SUNY Cortland as Assistant Professor of Modern U.S. History.