CV
EDUCATION
Ph.D., Culture and Theory, University of California, Irvine (June 2016)
Emphases: Critical Theory; Feminist Studies
B.A., Cultural Anthropology and Women’s Studies, Duke University (May 2007)
ACADEMIC POSITIONS
Current positions held
2021 – Present Founder and Inaugural Director, the bell hooks center, Berea College
2019 – Present Chair and Associate Professor, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Berea College
2017 – Present Visiting Faculty, Centre for Expanded Poetics, Department of English, Concordia University in Montréal, Canada
Previous positions held
2019 - 2021 Founding Director, Women’s and Gender Non-Conforming Center, Berea College
2018 – 2019 Acting Chair, Critical Identity Studies, Beloit College
2016 – 2019 Assistant Professor, Critical Identity Studies, Beloit College
2016 – 2018 Mellon Faculty Fellow, Associated Colleges of the Midwest
PUBLICATIONS AND MANUSCRIPTS IN PROGRESS
Peer-Reviewed articles
Single-authored articles
“Jay-Z’s afro-pessimism black femme(inism)s makes all lives matter.” Critical Essays on Hip Hop and the Study of Hip Hop: Know(the)Ledge (Palgrave Macmillan). Forthcoming.
“dancing in dehiscence.” Syndicate. “Symposium on Marquis Bey’s Black Trans Feminism.” August 9, 2023.
“Loving with bell, Leaping with Fanon, and Landing Nowhere.” Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy. Volume 30:2. 2022.
“Surviving the ends of Man: On the animal and/as black gaze in Jordan Peele’s Get Out and Us.” Journal for Critical Animal Studies. Volume 18:2. May 2021.
“Reaching backwards in time: The feltness of unfreedom in an antiblack world.” Theory & Event. Volume 24:2. April 2021.
“‘Dilemmas’ of Coalition and the Chronopolitics of Man: Towards an Insurgent Black Feminine Otherwise.” Theory and Event. Volume 21:1, Special Issue: Afro-pessimism and Black Feminism. January 2018.
“‘Teaching Trayvon’ at Irvine: On Feminist Praxis, Afro-pessimism, and ‘Woke Work’.” National Political Science Review, National Conference of Black Political Scientists. Volume 18, “Challenging the Legacies of Racial Resentment: Black Health Activism, Educational Justice, and Legislative Leadership.” 2016.
“On the Chronopolitics of Skin-ego: Antiblackness, Desire, and Identification in Bravo TV’s Shahs of Sunset.” Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge. Volume 29, “Black Holes: Afro-Pessimism, Blackness, and the Discourses of Modernity.” 2016.
“On the Chronopolitics of Black Social Life, or How Mister Winfield ‘Sends Go.’” Black Camera: An International Film Journal. Volume 7:1, Close-up: “Fugitivity and the Filmic Imagination.” 2015.
“Thinking Activism at UC Irvine: Remembering Christien ‘Glitch’ Rodriguez”. Trans-Scripts: An Inter-disciplinary Online Journal in the Humanities and Social Sciences at UC Irvine. Volume 3. 2013.
Co-authored articles
“Notes from the Kitchen, the Crossroads, and Everywhere Else, too: Ruptures of Thought, Word, and Deed from the ‘Arbiters of Blackness Itself’.” With Tiffany Willoughby-Herard. Theory and Event. Volume 21:1, Special Issue: Afro-pessimism and Black Feminism. January 2018.
Volumes edited
First Editor, Theory and Event. Volume 21:1. Special Issue: Afro-pessimism and Black Feminism. January 2018.
Assistant Editor, Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge. Volume 29, “Black Holes: Afro-Pessimism, Blackness and the Discourses of Modernity.” 2016.
Editor-in-Chief, Trans-Scripts: An Interdisciplinary Journal in the Humanities and Social Sciences at UC Irvine. Volume 3: “Thinking Activism.” 2013.
Editorial Board, Trans-Scripts: An Interdisciplinary Journal in the Humanities and Social Sciences at UC Irvine. Volume 1: “The ‘Post-Racial’ Society.” 2011; Volume 2: “Queer Interventions and Intersections.” 2012.
Exhibitions
Curatorial work
the bell hooks center exhibits, the bell hooks center, Berea College. May 2020 - June 2021. With E. Gale Greenlee, Natalie E. Brown, and Sharyn Mitchell.
“Black matter/ing: An Activist Poiesis,” Wright Museum of Art, Beloit College. November 2018 – February 2019. With Fall 2017 and Fall 2018 “Black Lives (Don’t) Matter” students.
Essays
“Welcome to 'Mambo Land', where black lives matter because they don’t: An Afro-pessimist reading of Della Wells’ black feminist world-making.” Exhibition catalog, Wright Museum of Art, Beloit College. August 28 - November 19, 2017. Republished in Portrait Society Gallery. September 3, 2017.
Talks
“Another Happy Mambo Day: The Invented Worlds of Della Wells,” Conversation with artist, Wright Museum of Art, Beloit College. September 1, 2017.
Public scholarship
Essays
“The fight for an Otherwise: Why the protests in Iran are about more than just women’s rights.” The Conversationalist. October 18, 2022.
“Critical Animal Studies has a race problem.” Mobilizing Ideas, The Center for the Study of Social Movements at the University of Notre Dame; and the American Sociological Association’s Animals & Society Section Newsletter. October/November 2020.
“The revolution will not be humanized.” The Conversationalist. June 5, 2020. Shared by RaceBaitr June 6, 2020. Shared by RaceBaitr June 7, 2020.
“Jay-Z’s 4:44 Moves Black Radical Thought Through and Beyond the Classroom.” CounterPunch. December 15, 2017. Republished in The Black Scholar (Routledge) December 21, 2017.
“Notions of Aryan Iranianness Must Be Rejected.” With Amy Tahani-Bidmeshki, Nasrin Rahimieh, and Parisa Vaziri. Letter, The Chronicle of Higher Education. September 13, 2017.
“An Open Letter to Iranian/American Academics and Scholars in the United States.” With Amy Tahani-Bidmeshki, Nasrin Rahimieh, and Parisa Vaziri. Medium. September 14, 2017.
“An Open Letter to Duke University’s Class of 2007, About Your Open Letter to Stephen Miller.” CounterPunch. March 24, 2017. Republished in The Black Scholar (Routledge) April 5, 2017.
“DAPL and the Matter/ing of Black Life.” The Feminist Wire. November 30, 2016. December 8, 2016. Republished in The Black Scholar (Routledge) December 8, 2016.
“New interdisciplinary resource, Black Lives Matter, introduces 6-12th graders to antiblack violence in U.S. law and society.” The Feminist Wire. August 17, 2015. Linked to Fox News August 23, 2015, The Daily Caller August 21, 2015, Fusion August 27, 2015, and Public Philosophy Journal August 18, 2015.
“It’s a hard knox life for a Duke woman who likes sex: An open letter to Belle Knox from the old guard.” JFCB: Popular Culture, Critical Theory, and the Limits of a Liberal Humanist Discourse. March 12, 2014.
“Understanding antiblack racism as species-ism: Reflections on Richard Sherman’s affective excess and the Twitterverse’s response.” JFCB: Popular Culture, Critical Theory, and the Limits of a Liberal Humanist Discourse. January 22, 2014. Republished in Racialicious: The intersection of race and popular culture. January 29, 2014. Linked to The Nation January 23, 2014.
“Trayvon Martin nativity scene co-opts Black erasure, urges victims to be ‘nonviolence, loving, [and] forgiving’.” JFCB: Popular Culture, Critical Theory, and the Limits of a Liberal Humanist Discourse. December 27, 2013.
“Justine Sacco tweet not wrong, because we would never let white people die at those rates.” JFCB: Popular Culture, Critical Theory, and the Limits of a Liberal Humanist Discourse. December 21, 2013.
“Kanye West I.Q. petition reeks of scientific racism.” JFCB: Popular Culture, Critical Theory, and the Limits of a Liberal Humanist Discourse. December 17, 2013.
“Reading Beyoncé’s ‘Superpower’ as a love letter to Black radical insurgency: An open letter to white feminists who want to remind us that Beyoncé’s music is just ‘art’.” JFCB: Popular Culture, Critical Theory, and the Limits of a Liberal Humanist Discourse. December 15, 2013. Republished in Racialicious: The intersection of race and popular culture. December 23, 2013. Linked to Hiphopocracy. January 6, 2014.
Podcasts
“On love, bell hooks, and our climate crisis” Extinction Rebellion Radio. New York City and Pacifica Radio Network. December 2022.
“Unbreaking Media: Our kind of feminism.” The Conversationalist, Episode 2. March 24, 2022.
“Sylvia Wynter, ‘Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom.’” Always Already: A Critical Theory Podcast, Episode 57. June 28, 2018.
“Alexis Pauline Gumbs, M Archive.” Always Already: A Critical Theory Podcast, Episode 54. February 6, 2018.
“On the Cornel West – Ta-Nehisi Coates Brouhaha.” Always Already: A Critical Theory Podcast. December 20, 2017.
“Calvin Warren and Frank Wilderson III on Antiblackness, Nihilism, and Politics.” Always Already: A Critical Theory Podcast, Episode 48. May 5, 2017.
“Get Out” (dir. Jordan Peele, 2017). Always Already: A Critical Theory Podcast, Episode 47 (minute 45:00 – 55:00). March 6, 2017.
“Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks.” Always Already: A Critical Theory Podcast, Episode 43. October 4, 2016.
Interviews
“Becoming bell hooks.” Kentucky Educational Television (KET/PBS). February 27, 2024.
“Author bell hooks, Butterfly Greenhouse, and More.” Kentucky Life. Kentucky Educational Television (KET/PBS). Season 28, Episode 14. May 20, 2023.
“The Black Woman’s Burden: Battling Inertia in Higher Ed.” Diverse: Issues in Higher Education. March 13, 2023.
“Late Kentucky scholar dropped from AP African American Studies curriculum.” Lex 18 News (NBC). February 6, 2023.
“Ky. author's books being removed from AP course curriculum.” WKYT News (CBS). February 6, 2023.
bell hooks day coverage, Kentucky edition, Kentucky Educational Television (KET/PBS). September 22, 2022.
“Berea College celebrates first bell hooks day.” FOX 56 News. September 21, 2022.
“The critic of our time: An interview on bell hooks’ life, love and legacy.” The Platform. July 20, 2022.
“Here’s what bell hooks’ friends and colleagues want you to remember about her.” NPR. December 29, 2021.
FELLOWSHIPS AND AWARDS
2018 George S. Parker Faculty Curatorship, Wright Museum of Art, Beloit College
2017 Women of Color Leadership Project, National Women’s Studies Association
2016 Keefer Junior Faculty Grant, Beloit College
2015 Graduate Student Research Award, University of California, Irvine
2011 Dean’s Gateway Award in Persian Studies, University of California, Irvine
2009 Regents’ Fellowship, University of California, Irvine
Hammed Shahidian Critical Feminist Paper Award, Iranian Women’s Studies Foundation
2007 Judith McDade Prize in Cultural Anthropology, Duke University
grants
2021 – 2024 “Honoring the Legacy of bell hooks at Berea College,” Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Awarded to the bell hooks center at Berea College.
PRESENTATIONS
Invited Talks (selected)
2023 Guest speaker in “Topics in Critical Philosophy of Race,” McGill University (February 21)
“In Conversation with… [Beverly Guy-Sheftall],” Symposium on the Lives and Legacy of Lani Guinier and bell hooks, Brown University (February 17-18)
2022 “Loving (and gossiping) with bell.” From Oppression to Love: Remembering bell hooks. Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning. National Council of Teachers of English (December 16).
Keynote speaker, “All about love (and dissidence): Dreaming with bell hooks,” Northern Nevada Diversity Summit, University of Nevada, Reno (April 6)
Moderator, “bell hooks: A Legacy Rooted in Love,” University of Kentucky Libraries and College of Arts and Sciences (February 12)
Guest speaker in “Critical Race Theory: A Crash Course,” Michell Hamline School of Law (January 14)
2020 Guest lecture in “Dreams of a Common Language,” Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, Harvard University (November 24)
2018 Panelist, “Anti-blackness in Debate: (Black)ness, Immigration, and Fugitivity,” Office of Student Activities and Leadership, Department of Student Affairs, University of Michigan (July 14).
2017 Guest Lecture in “Approaches to Comparative Cultural Studies,” Department of Comparative Studies, Ohio State University (October 18).
2016 Guest Lecture in “Introduction to Visual and Cultural Studies,” Department of Media Arts and Culture, Occidental College (October 12).
2015 Panelist, “Women’s Voices Now” film festival, Levantine Cultural Center, Los Angeles (June 6-7).
“Richard Sherman, the Sports-Media Complex, and How Black Lives (Don’t) Matter,” Black History Month Series, Glendale Community College, Los Angeles (February 24).
2014 Roundtable with Hortense Spillers, “Some Speculations on Sentiment: Women and Revolution,” Koehn Lecture and Undergraduate Conference in Critical Theory, UC Irvine (May 27-28).
2011 Respondent to Heather Love, “The Stigma Archive,” UC Irvine (May 20).
Conference Presentations (selected)
2022 “Transgressing Institutionality: the bell hooks center at Berea College.” Annual National Women’s Studies Association Conference in Minneapolis, MN (November 10-13).
“Any place where the arms will hold you: Embodying our grief for bell hooks.” Annual National Women’s Studies Association Conference in Minneapolis, MN (November 10-13).
2019 “Black-Animal Kinship in Jordan Peele’s ‘Get Out’ and ‘Us’” in The Revolution Will Not Be Humanized, Annual National Women’s Studies Association Conference in San Francisco, CA (November 14-17).
2018 Revolutionary Space: How Physical Environments Shape Identity, Equity, and Knowledge Production, Roundtable with Lisa Brock, Linda Strong-Leek, Karlyn Crowley and others, Annual National Women’s Studies Association Conference in Atlanta, GA (November 8-11).
“The Anti-Pedagogy of Afro-pessimism: Undoing viscera, guts, and instincts,” in Ethical Questions in Teaching Afro-Pessimism, Annual American Studies Association Conference in Atlanta, GA (November 8-11).
"Chronopolitical Assemblages in Iranian Contexts" in Reconceptualizing the Study of Race, Annual Association of Iranian Studies Conference in Irvine, CA (August 14-17).
“Black Matter/ing at Standing Rock: An Activist Poiesis” in The Spirit of the Matter: Conjuring Other Worlds in Art and Activism, Annual National Women’s Studies Association Conference in Baltimore, MD (November 16-19).
2015 “On the Chronopolitics of Skin-ego and the Jouissance of Surface Sexualities,” Black/Queer Ontologies Conference, Black Queer Sexuality Studies Collective, Princeton University. Keynote Speaker: Saidiya Hartman (October 24).
2011 “Queer Oppositional Politics: ‘Coming Out’ as Narrative Failure,” Annual Cultural Studies Association Conference in Chicago, IL (March 24-26) and Annual Northeast Modern Language Association Convention in New Brunswick, NJ (April 7-10).
2010 “Queering Iran: Economies of Sexual Quarantine,” Culture and Theory Conference in Irvine, CA (April 30) and Annual Midwest Popular Culture/American Culture Association Conference in Minneapolis, Minnesota (October 1-3).
Campus Talks and Community Events (selected)
2023 Conversation with Roxane Gay, “Writing Toward a Better World,” Convocation series, Berea College (March 2)
2022 Conversation with Katy Pyle, “Ballez: Queering Up the Ballet Canon,” Gender Talk series, bell hooks center, Berea College (February 23)
2021 Conversation with Olympian Ibtihaj Muhammad, “Navigating Life and Sport as a Black Muslim Woman,” Berea College Convocations (April 15)
2018 Panelist, “Imagining Black and Indigenous Futures” with Steven Salaita, #GetWoke series, Office of Academic Diversity and Inclusiveness, Beloit College (April 6).
2017 Respondent, “The Midwife’s Bag: Political Ontology and Black Infant Mortality,” Public Lecture with Annie Menzel, Beloit College (March 28).
2016 Keynote speaker, “Solidarity with Standing Rock,” Beloit College (Nov. 19).
Panelist, “Burqa ban in global contexts: politics, peoples, histories,” Beloit College (September 12).
Papers delivered in absentia
2018 “Notes from the Kitchen, the Crossroads, and Everywhere Else, too: Ruptures of Thought, Word, and Deed from the ‘Arbiters of Blackness Itself,’” delivered by co-author Tiffany Willoughby-Herard, Institute of Gender Studies, University of South Africa (March 8).
“The Anti-Pedagogy of Afro-pessimism: Undoing viscera, guts, and instincts,” delivered by Franco Barchiesi, Critical Ethnic Studies Association Conference in British Columbia, Canada (June 21-24).
LANGUAGE
2012 Persian Summer Language Institute, California State University at Fullerton
2003 – 2007 Arabic language, Duke University and The American University in Cairo
PROFESSIONAL SERVICE (selected)
2022 - 2023 Committee Member, Amir Saadiq, Master of Fine Art in Visual Art, University of California, San Diego.
2022 Reviewer, Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy
2021 Reviewer, Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies
2019 – 2020 Reviewer, Black Camera
2018 Reviewer, Theory and Event
2016 Reviewer, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies
2015 – 2016 Curriculum consultant, Program in Ethnic Studies, Irvine Valley College
2011 – 2012 Chair, Graduate Student Association, PhD Program in Culture and Theory, UC Irvine
PROFESSIONAL AFFILIATIONS
National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA)
American Studies Association (ASA)
Association for Iranian Studies (AIS)
Critical Ethnic Studies Association (CES)
Cultural Studies Association (CSA)
Modern Language Association (MLA).
TEACHING EXPERIENCE
2019 – Present Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Berea College
Gender, Sexuality, and Black Lives Matter: This lower-division course introduces students to articulations of racial blackness that destabilize binary notions of sex/gender and sexuality. The Black Lives Matter movement is rephrased here as a question for feminism about black reproductive futurity and the limits of Western metaphysical philosophy.
Theory in the Flesh: Black Feminist Theory: This sophomore and junior-level course explores contemporary and foundational black feminist texts to attend to the intersections of blackness, gender, sexuality, desire, and embodiment; aesthetic and expressive cultures; the political, personal, and libidinal; the politics of respectability; reproductive and environmental justice; Enlightenment and other theories of humanity; and the everyday business of black social life.
Animals, Monsters, and Others (oh my!): This sophomore and junior-level course asks students to consider how monstrous and animal others are raced, sexed, and gendered in popular media. Querying representation as a trap that mires us in non-human caricatures, readings include texts by Che Gossett, Colin Dayan, Tavia Nyong’o, Joshua Bennett, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and more.
Intersectionality and its Dis/Contents: This capstone examines how intersectionality (Kimberlé Crenshaw’s canonical concept for thinking about how the institutions of identity and difference like sex/gender, sexuality, race, ability, etc. are co-constitutive) is challenged and/or upheld by recent contributions to Women’s and Gender Studies. Women and queer of color critiques of (white) feminism’s blindness to race/ism are privileged.
The Revolution Will Not Be Humanized: This General Education capstone introduces students to critiques of humanism offered by thinkers like Frantz Fanon, Sylvia Wynter, Kim Tallbear, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, and others, in order to facilitate their learning of liberal humanism as a project that has failed to protect the most vulnerable among us, and so that they might articulate demands for revolution outside of humanist discourse.
2016 – 2019 Critical Identity Studies, Beloit College
Sex and Power: This introductory course introduces students to the intersections of racialized and sexualized identities, gendered expressions, dis/ability, and power, with a focus on representations of difference in popular culture, including but not limited to media cultures. Responsibilities include overseeing one teaching aide.
Black Lives (Don’t) Matter: This upper-division advanced theory course introduces students to discourses of modernity that exclude black persons from human recognitions and protections. Students interrogate popular media representations that reproduce racist spectacle to ask how black lives can matter, if at all, and to further deliberate how black lives might be sexed and gendered. Responsibilities include overseeing one teaching aide.
Local Colonialisms: This upper-division course investigates historical and contemporary manifestations of colonial relations. Drawing on the expertise of faculty, staff, and the local community, this course asks students to consider how “the local” both represents and resists larger histories of conquest, settlement, and citizenship.
Independent Studies: “Human Beings, Before and Beyond: Racialized Human/ism in Nalini
Singh's Psy/Change-ling Series” (Spring 2017); “Blackademics: Black, Educated, and Petty” (Fall 2017, Spring 2018); “Nueva Trova: Puerto Rican Music in the Face of Colonization” (Spring 2018); Public Fellows (Fall 2018, Spring 2019).
2013 – 2016 Humanities Core Course Program, UC Irvine
A year-long, multidisciplinary literature and composition course emphasizing close reading practices and critical thinking skills. Students learn how arguments are evidenced in different humanist disciplines like History, Philosophy, English, Comparative Literature, and Film and Media Studies, and must work to similarly defend arguable claims in writing assignments. Students are tasked with literary analysis, conceptual analysis, historical analysis, film analysis, literary journalism, op-ed and blog writing, and independent research. Theme: “War”.
2010 – 2015 Gender and Sexuality Studies, UC Irvine
Gender and Feminism (Summer 2014): The first in a three-part introductory series. Emphasis on black feminist interventions, intersectional and transnational assemblages of sex and gender, and the impact of these discourses on/for critical humanism(s). Responsibilities include overseeing one teaching aide.
Gender and Power (Summer 2015): The second in a three-part introductory series. Special Topic: “Black Lives (Don’t) Matter”. Emphasis on the gendering of anti-black racism and on media representations of extra-legal black murders.
Gender and Popular Culture (Summer 2013-14): The third in a three-part introductory series. Emphasis on media representations of black masculinity. Responsibilities include overseeing one teaching aide.
Gender and Power (Winter 2011-2013); Lilith Mahmud and Laura Kang, Instructors of Record. Guest Lecture: “Transnational Feminisms” (March 3, 2011).
Gender and Popular Culture (Spring 2011- 2013); Jeanne Scheper and Kavita Philip, Instructors of Record. Guest Lecture: “New Media and Cyber Activism” (June 2, 2011).
Gender and Feminism (Fall 2010-2012; Summer 2012); Priya J. Shah and Karen Kim, Instructors of Record. Guest Lecture: “Gender Performance and Consumer Culture” (October 21, 2010).
2004 – 2007 Women’s Studies, Duke University
Dating and Mating: The ‘hookup’ culture at Duke: This popular student-run ‘house course’ attracted upwards of 30 students each semester. Its syllabus inspired a formal cross-listed, special topics course in Cultural Anthropology and Women’s Studies in 2006.
RELATED EMPLOYMENT
Journalism (selected)
2008 Acting Communications Director, National Iranian American Council: write op-eds, news articles and press releases; manage website content; media outreach; public relations; branding.
2006 – 2007 Freelance Journalist, The Herald Sun
2003 – 2007 Journalist, Office of News and Communications, Duke University
Columnist, The Chronicle, Duke University
2003 Student Columnist, Los Angeles Times
Non-profit (selected)
2008 – 2009 President, Founding Board of Directors, Open Forum Foundation
Senior Program Assistant, Exchange Programs, America-Mideast Educational & Training Services, Inc.: manage State Department-funded programs, including the Iraqi Women’s Democracy Project, the Peace Builder’s Conference, the Legal and Business Fellowship Program, and the English Access Micro-Scholarship Program.
2007 – 2008 Iraqi Young Leaders Exchange Program Coordinator, Sister Cities International: plan and administer state department program for 22 Iraqi high school students; develop program curricula; manage interns.
2007 Middle East Intern, International Crisis Group: research assistant to the Middle East and North Africa Program Directors.
2006 Civil Rights Intern, Council on American-Islamic Relations, Los Angeles: litigation work on ACLU class action lawsuit, filed against U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the Department of Homeland Security, and the FBI on August 1, 2006.