Amira Rose Davis

Amira Rose Davis is a 20th century U.S. historian with a particular interest in race, gender, sports and politics. She is an Assistant Professor of History and Women’s Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her first book,“Can’t Eat a Medal”: The Lives and Labors of Black Women Athletes in the Age of Jim Crow, traces the long history of Black women’s athletic labor and symbolic representation in the United States. Using black newspapers and magazines, advertisements, institutional records of black colleges and social organizations, yearbooks, scorecards, Olympic reports, personal and family correspondence, and oral histories, her work demonstrates the ways in which black women’s athletics impacted negotiations of modern and respectable black womanhood, concepts of racial destiny and struggles for civil rights. While highlighting women who used athletics to gain social mobility or assert new notions of black womanhood, this project ultimately argues that black institutions, sporting organizations and state apparatuses routinely used black women’s athletic bodies to advance their respective social, political, and financial interests.

She received her doctorate in History from Johns Hopkins University in 2016. Davis is also the co-host of the Feminist sports podcast, Burn it All Down.