Janell Hobson is Professor in the Department of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University at Albany. She is also Director of both Undergraduate Studies and the Honors Program. She joined the core faculty shortly after receiving her PhD in Women's Studies at Emory University. Hobson has since devoted her research, teaching, and service to multiracial and transnational feminist issues in the discipline with a focus on representations and histories of women in the African Diaspora.

Hobson is the author of When God Lost Her Tongue: Historical Consciousness and the Black Feminist Imagination (Routleldge, 2021), Venus in the Dark: Blackness and Beauty in Popular Culture (Routledge, 2005, second edition, 2018), and Body as Evidence: Mediating Race, Globalizing Gender (SUNY Press, 2012). She has also edited the volumes Are All the Women Still White? Rethinking Race, Expanding Feminisms (SUNY Press, 2016) and The Routledge Companion to Black Women鈥檚 Cultural Histories (Routledge, 2021). She is a contributing writer to Ms. Magazine, as well as various online platforms. She also guest edited special volumes on Harriet Tubman and slavery in popular culture. She was selected as a Community Fellow for 2021-2022 at the University at Albany鈥檚 Institute for History and Public Engagement, which supports her guest editing of the Harriet Tubman Bicentennial Project with Ms. Magazine for the Spring 2022 semester.

Hobson teaches diverse courses on intersections of race, class, gender, media, popular culture, and feminist theory.