Corey Capers

Assistant Professor

Corey Capers is Assistant Professor of Black American and Early American History at Texas State University. A cultural historian, Capers earned his PhD in the History of Consciousness from the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he focused on Early American History, Cultural Studies, and post-structural Critical Theory.  His current areas of research focus on race, gender, trauma, and popular culture.

Prior to coming to Texas State, he held a join appointment in History and Black Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago. During his tenure there, he was awarded by the Department of History and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences for excellence in teaching. Additionally, Capers worked with the Newberry Library with both the Chicago History Advanced Placement Project and the Homewood-Flossmoor American History Consortium to develop new curricula and lesson plans for high school teachers. Prior to entering the academy, he was Program Coordination of Youth Violence Prevention at the Mental Health Association of Greater Dallas.

Capers’s in-progress book manuscript, “Public Blackness, Printed Bodies: Black Liberty and Afro-fetishism in Early Republic Prints,” tracks the dialogue between early Black abolitionists and their racist antagonists as evidenced in what he calls the “print traffic in free black bodies” located in early republic newspapers, pamphlets, and broadsides. His work shows how newly freed Africans used institution-building, print publicity and religious discipline as a means of engaging and changing the parameters of the public in the early national north. In addition, Capers documents how the vernacular figure of “Bobalition” (a parodic corruption of “Abolition”) mocked Black freedom as pretentious and disorderly to critique the project of democracy more broadly, linking both to notions of political corruption and anarchy.

In addition to surveys in Early American and Black History, Dr. Capers teaches courses focused on popular culture, race, power, and post-structural methods.