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. 

My peer-reviewed articles appear in the Journal of African American History, Journal of Urban History, and Dance Chronicle. My article, “Civic Education and Artistic Innovation on New York City’s Dancemobile, 1967–1988” (Journal of Urban History, 2023), won the Sally Banes Biennial Publication Prize (American Society for Theatre Research) and the Selma Jeanne Cohen Prize in Dance Aesthetics (American Society for Aesthetics) and earned honorable mentions for the Nupur Chaudhuri First Article Prize (Coordinating Council for Women in History) and the Arnold Hirsch Award (Urban History Association). 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 given 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. I am currently Assistant Professor of History at SUNY Cortland, and previously served as Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Dickinson College and Adjunct Assistant Professor at Penn.

Embodying the Movement: Black Modern Dance and Community Engagement in New York City and Beyond

The manuscript traces how choreographers such as Alvin Ailey, Rod Rodgers, Eleo Pomare, and Carole Johnson built public platforms—from Harlem’s Dancemobile to national television specials—to democratize modern dance and reshape debates on race and citizenship. Learn more...