Jane Rhodes

Jane Rhodes is Professor of Black Studies and Associate Dean for Faculty Research in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois Chicago. She earned a doctorate from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and was a faculty member and/or administrator at Indiana University, the University of California-San Diego, and Macalester College. Rhodes’ research interests include the history of the Black press, media representations of Black social movements, and African American women’s history and culture. Her work seeks to understand how aggrieved groups mobilize media forms and expressive culture as acts of resistance. Her first book Mary Ann Shadd Cary: The Black Press and Protest in the Nineteenth Century was named the best book in media history by the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. A new edition is due to out in Fall 2023 to commemorate Shadd Cary’s bicentennial. Rhodes’ second monograph, Framing the Black Panthers: The Spectacular Rise of a Black Power Icon is also in a second edition. Rhodes has held several fellowships including a residency at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, a visiting fellowship at the Centre for the Study of the Arts, Social Science, and Humanities at the University of Cambridge, UK and as a visiting fellow at the Centre for Black Humanities at the University of Bristol, UK.  She is also co-PI of a new grant from the Mellon Foundation titled “Humanizing Critical Race Theory.” Rhodes is a frequent analyst for local, national and international media and has been consultant on multiple film projects. She is in the midst of two book-length projects: TransAtlantic Blackness in the Era of Jim Crow: The Life of Marie Battle Singer; and Rebel Media: Adventures in the History of the Black Public Sphere.