GerShun Avilez an associate professor&nbsp;and Director of Graduate Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is a cultural studies scholar who specializes in contemporary African American and Black Diasporic literatures and visual cultures. Much of his scholarship explores how questions of gender and sexuality inform artistic production.&nbsp;He has published two books:&nbsp;Radical Aesthetics and Modern Black Nationalism&nbsp;(2016) and&nbsp;Black Queer Freedom&nbsp;(2020).&nbsp;He has written essays on a range of historical and cultural subjects, including the Cold War, segregation narratives, early African American writing, race &amp; terror, social death, queer life, experimental poetry, Black women’s writing, the Harlem Renaissance, Black Power gender politics, and the Black Arts Movement.

GerShun Avilez

David Sterling Brown is assistant professor of English at Binghamton University, SUNY. He is a current&nbsp;<a href="https://www.acls.org/research/fellow.aspx?cid=08A46DF4-468E-EB11-B1B1-000D3A33F431">Mellon/ACLS Scholars and Society Fellow</a>&nbsp;whose 2021–2022 residency will be with The Racial Imaginary Institute, founded by Claudia Rankine. Brown has numerous&nbsp;<a href="https://binghamton.academia.edu/DavidSterlingBrown">published, and forthcoming, essays</a> on Shakespeare, race, and early modern English literature. His in-progress book interrogates racialized whiteness and anti-Blackness in Shakespearean drama.

David Sterling Brown

Kristina Huang is assistant professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research interests focus on literatures around slavery and abolition, Cultural Studies, and social movements through the Black Atlantic world.&nbsp;

Kristina Huang

Dr. Brittany S. Hull is an interdisciplinary scholar from Chester, Pennsylvania, whose work centers Black women’s language and Black girl literacies. She holds a PhD in Composition and Applied Linguistics from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Hull is a 2017 CCCC Chair’s Memorial Scholar, and a recipient of the 2018 CCCC Scholars for the Dream award. Currently, her research examines the scholarly identity development of Black language speaking Black women teachers of English as they enter and navigate academia (specifically, the field of composition &amp; rhetoric). She is a proud HBCU Alumna of The Lincoln University of Pennsylvania and member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Incorporated. When not teaching, one can catch Dr. Hull reading, listening to new music, or hanging out with friends. With a teaching commitment to honoring Black language and helping students bring more of their whole selves to their writing, Dr. Hull is currently a Writing and Rhetoric Lecturer at Stanford University.

Brittany S. Hull

Kian Kelley-Chung is a revolutionary artist from Columbia, Maryland. His work lies at the intersection of visual storytelling and social justice. Kian is one of the co-directors of the documentary film series Free the People, and the founder and leader of the artist collective RXNIN LIFE.

Kian Kelley-Chung

Temptaous Mckoy is an assistant professor of English with a focus in Technical and Professional Communication, as well as the Coordinator of Graduate Studies in the Department Language, Literature, and Cultural Studies at Bowie State University. Her research focuses on redefining the field of TPC and challenging it to be more inclusive of the (in)formal communicative and learning practices as found in Black communities, such as HBCUs. She is an HBCU alum (Elizabeth City State Univ.) and also a member of Sigma Gamma Rho Sorority, Inc. She obtained her BA in English from Elizabeth City State University (’13); her MA in Professional Communication and Leadership (’15) from Armstrong State University (Now GA Southern at Armstrong); and her PhD in Rhetoric, Writing, and Professional Communication from East Carolina University (’19). She is the author of a three-time award-winning dissertation: “Y’all Call It Technical and Professional Communication, We Call It #ForTheCulture” as well. Recently, she served as chair of the CCCCs Black Technical and Professional Communication Task Force. Finally, she is the associate editor of the Peitho Journal, where she aims to prioritize new titles for review that are published by historically marginalized scholars to leverage Peitho’s platform to take tangible steps toward a more inclusive field of scholarship in the feminist history of rhetoric and composition. Specifically, she believes book reviews can amplify the contributions of historically marginalized scholars in important and impactful ways. Finally, she is one of the co-editors of the Technical Communications Quarterly Black Technical Communication Special Issue.

Temptaous Mckoy

Megan Peiser is a mixed-heritage enrolled citizen of Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. She is assistant professor of English at Oakland University in Michigan, where her research and teaching focus on 18th-century women writers, book history and bibliography, digital humanities, periodicals, and Indigenous studies. She is president of the Aphra Behn Society, co-PI of the&nbsp;<a href="https://margueritehickspro.wixsite.com/home">Marguerite Hicks Project</a>&nbsp;with Emily Spunaugle, the shepherd of two miniature dachshunds, and a student of her garden.

Megan Peiser

Emily Yoon Perez is incoming&nbsp;assistant professor of English at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Her research investigates transnational formations of race as represented in minority US literatures, expanding the scope of American literature and American understandings of race from the national to the global. Her book project focuses on the migrations and intimacies of minority subjects, bringing together transnational literary studies, comparative racialization studies, postcolonial theory, and ethnic studies.

Emily Yoon Perez

Robbie Richardson is a member of Pabineau Mi’kmaq First Nation in New Brunswick, Canada, and assistant professor of English at Princeton University. He is the author of The Savage and Modern Self: North American Indians in Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Culture (U Toronto Press, 2018), and is currently working on a book about the history of Indigenous objects from the Americas and South Pacific collected in Europe prior to 1800.

Robbie Richardson

Dr. Cecilia D. Shelton is a Technical and Professional Communication scholar whose work draws on Black feminism as a source of theory and praxis. She prioritizes the perspectives, goals, and experiences of Black people (and other marginalized communities) as a way to achieve more equitable communication solutions to contemporary social, political, and organizational problems. She is an assistant professor of English at the University of Maryland.

Cecilia D. Shelton

Keely Toledo is a proud member of the Navajo Nation and is Edgewater (Tábąąhá) born for Mud (Hasht ł ’ishnii). She is a rising senior at Princeton University, Co-President of Natives at Princeton (NAP), and a member of the Princeton Indigenous Advocacy Coalition (PIAC).

Keely Toledo

Dr. Xine Yao is lecturer in American Literature to 1900 at University College London. Her first book is Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America, which has won Duke University Press’s Scholars of Color First Book Award (October 2021). Her honors include the American Studies Association’s Yasuo Sakakibara Essay Prize and her research has been supported by grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. She is a BBC Radio 3/AHRC New Generation Thinker and the co-host of PhDivas Podcast.

Xine Yao

Antiracism in the Contemporary University

"Never be afraid to sit awhile and think." — Lorraine Hansberry

Philosophy &amp; Religion

GerShun Avilez an associate professor&nbsp;and Director of Graduate Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is a cultural studies scholar who specializes in contemporary African American and Black Diasporic literatures and visual cultures. Much of his scholarship explores how questions of gender and sexuality inform artistic production.&nbsp;He has published two books:&nbsp;Radical Aesthetics and Modern Black Nationalism&nbsp;(2016) and&nbsp;Black Queer Freedom&nbsp;(2020).&nbsp;He has written essays on a range of historical and cultural subjects, including the Cold War, segregation narratives, early African American writing, race &amp; terror, social death, queer life, experimental poetry, Black women’s writing, the Harlem Renaissance, Black Power gender politics, and the Black Arts Movement.

GerShun Avilez

Articles

Antiracism in the Contemporary University