EDUCATION

2016   Ph.D.   Ethnic Studies, University of California at San Diego

2008   B.A.    Interdisciplinary Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

TEACHING & RESEARCH

As a scholar, my thinking is guided by a strong commitment to advancing the intersectional and interdisciplinary study of race, sexuality, gender, ethnicity, and culture through research, teaching, and service with areas of research specialization including black feminisms and global black sexualities along with sex work, critical trafficking and carceral studies. My work has been supported by the University of Missouri Research Board, Institute for Citizens and Scholars (formerly the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship Foundation), and US Fulbright Scholars Program. While my first book examined how the sexual policing of Black women sex workers was foundational to the city of San Diego’s development as a center of tourism and the military, my current project takes a more global and transhistorical approach by examining how African heritage tourism in Brazil engenders new sex economies and forms of relationality in the African Diaspora. 

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

Carney, Christina (2025). Disreputable Women: Black Sex Economies and the Making of San Diego. University of California Press.

Carney, Christina (2024), “The Worse Element”: Black Sex Workers, White Slavery, and Sexual Policing in San Diego.” Special Issue, “Troubling Terms and the Sex Trades,” in Radical History Review, edited by Rachel Schreiber and Judith Walkowitz, 24 (149), May 2024, 133-151. 

Carney, Christina (2019) ed., “Centering Pleasure and Anti-Respectability in Black Studies.” Special Forum Issue, American Quarterly, 71(1), 135-204.

Carney, C., Hernandez, J. and Wallace, A. M. (2016), “Sexual knowledge and practiced feminisms: On moral panic, black girlhoods, and hip hop.” Journal of Popular Music Studies, 28: 412–426

Carney, Christina. (2012), “The Politics of Representation for Black Women and the Impossibility of Queering the New Jersey 4/7.” In Wish to Live: The Hip-Hop Feminism Pedagogy Reader, edited by Ruth Nicole Brown and Chamara Jewel Kwakye, 71–77. New York: Peter Lang Publishing.

CLASSES TAUGHT

Undergraduate 

Gender and Identity: Understanding Intersectionality

Historical Studies of Black Women

Black Sexual Politics

Introduction to Black Studies

Mixed Level Courses (Advanced Undergraduate and Graduate)

Black Feminism: Past and Present