Bryan Cooper Owens

Visiting Instructor

Africana Studies

Bryan Cooper Owens is a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Connecticut. He is finishing his doctoral studies in African History at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln.   Cooper Owens earned an M.A. in African Studies (Anthropology concentration) from UCLA, and prior to that, Cooper Owens attended Clark Atlanta University and obtained his first M.A. degree in African American Studies (History concentration). A native West Virginian and proud “Affrilachian,” he earned his B.A. in Anthropology at West Virginia University.

He is the former interim Director of the Queens College Africana Studies program and served as a lecturer in the Department of History there. He also taught African American History and Studies at the University of Mississippi. Cooper Owens’ research interests center on the ways that African aesthetics and cultural values have been adapted, coopted, commodified, and utilized by various communities in the African Diaspora. In looking at both continental and Diasporic African communities he is keenly interested in the phenomena of African retentions and the specific ways that African aesthetics and cultural ideas become transformed when exposed to new environments and paradigms.

PUBLICATIONS

• Cooper Owens, E. Bryan. “Racebending and Representation in Comic Books” Black Perspectives – African American Intellectual History Society https://www.aaihs.org/racebending-and-representation-in-comic-books/, (2017)