Noliwe Rooks facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Noliwe Rooks
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| Born | 1963 (age 60–61) |
| Alma mater | University of Iowa |
| Occupation | Chair of and professor in the Africana Studies department at Brown University |
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Notable work
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Hair Raising: Beauty, Culture and African American Women
Ladies Pages: African American Women's Magazines and the Culture that Made Them White Money/Black Power: African American Studies and the Crises of Race in Higher Education Cutting School: Privatization, Segregation, and the End of Public Education |
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Noliwe Rooks (born 1963) is an American academic and author. She is the L. Herbert Ballou University Professor and chair of Africana Studies at Brown University and is the founding director of the Segrenomics Lab at Brown. She previously held the W.E.B. Du Bois Professorship of Literature at Cornell University.
Early life and education
Rooks was born in 1963 to Belvie Rooks, a writer from the Fillmore District in San Francisco. Rooks spent her childhood in San Francisco with her mother and in Florida with her father and grandmother. She also traveled with her mother to Africa and the Caribbean.
Rooks earned her B.A. in English from Spelman College and her M.A. and Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Iowa.
Career
By 1996, Rooks was one of the first Black professors in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Missouri–Kansas City. She was the associate director of the African-American program at Princeton University for ten years, and published White Money, Black Power: The Surprising History of African American Studies and the Crisis of Race in Higher Education while she was there.
Rooks arrived at Cornell University in 2012 as an associate professor of Africana studies. At Cornell, Rooks was the W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of Literature and published Cutting School: Privatization, Segregation, and the End of Public Education. In Cutting School, Rooks coined the term "segrenomics" to describe a form of profit derived by businesses that continue to sell what she describes as "separate, segregated, and unequal forms of education" during the modern era of privatization and deregulation of public education.
After the spring 2021 semester at Cornell, she joined the faculty of Brown.
Books
Honors and awards
- Hair Raising: Beauty, Culture and African American Women won the 1997 Outstanding University Press Book Award from the Public Library Association and the 1997 Choice Award for Outstanding Academic Book.
- Cutting School: Privatization, Segregation, and the End of Public Education was a finalist for the 2018 Legacy Award from the Hurston/Wright Foundation in the nonfiction category.
