Building Black Futures Through
Black Study

Dr. Ambrose’s work is concerned with Black trans and queer spiritualities and religious expressions as they inform communal healing and activism. Looking to archives, cultural productions, and autoethnographic research as resources moral imagination, I am interested in how practices engaging the sacred have/may shape social change toward more just futures.

El/yse Ambrose, Ph.D. (they/them)* is a blackqueer ethicist, creative, and educator whose research, art, and teaching lie at the intersections of race, sexuality, gender, and spirituality/religion.

Ambrose’s forthcoming book, A Blackqueer Ethics: Embodiment, Possibility, and Living Archive (T&T Clark [London], Enquiries in Embodiment, Sexuality, and Social Ethics series) offers a construction of a communal-based ethics of sexuality and grounded in blackqueer archive. Their artistic work-in-progress, mycountryboy|what do i know, is a photo-sonic study of Ambrose’s paternal roots that addresses themes of place, opacities, monstrosity, and religion. 

Their research has been supported by Columbia University’s Center on African American Religion, Sexual Politics, and Social Justice, the Henry Luce Foundation, the Yale University LGBT Studies Fellowship, the Mellon Humanities Fellowship, and the Louisville Institute. Ambrose’s research interests include black religion, religious ethics, religion and social change, queer and trans studies in religion, and spiritual traditions of the U.S. South. 

*I am both Elyse and El. As a blackqueer gender ambiguous person, my names are my primary referents. However, in line with English language conventions, “they/them” are appropriate pronouns to employ. 

Office: CHASS INTN 2008

Dr. Jerry’s primary interests are in theorizing the relationship between blackness and citizenship. His work highlights how blackness has historically been conceived of as the means of production and the ways that this conceptualization continues to inform the possibilities for recognition, expression, and experiences of blackness in Mexico and the U.S. Southwest.

Anthony Russell Jerry holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, an MA in Applied anthropology from San Diego State University, and an MBA from the Anderson Graduate School of Management at UC Riverside. He is the recipient of a Fulbright Garcia Robles Fellowship, a Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship, and a University of California Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellowship. His research interests are in Blackness, Citizenship, Subject-Making, and Black entrepreneurship (Cultural and Social) in the “Americas.”  He is also the founder and director of the Cultural Media Archive and The Learning Archive, online platforms designed to promote racial literacy and social and emotion learning through building empathy and awareness.

Office: 1328c Watkins Hall

Dr. Imani Kai Johnson is an interdisciplinary scholar specializing in the Africanist aesthetics, Hip Hop streetdance cultures and practices, oral history and ethnography, and structures of power. She was raised in Northern California and attended undergrad at UC Berkeley, majoring in Economics and English. She has a Master’s degree at New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study – where she focused on African American and Afro-Caribbean History and Literature – and completed her doctorate in American Studies and Ethnicity at USC. During a postdoctoral fellowship at NYU’s Performance Studies Department, she founded and hosted two Show & Prove Hip Hop Studies Conferences (S&P), which are dedicated to nurturing a platform for transdisciplinary exchanges that shape the future of Hip Hop Studies. Beginning at UCR in 2014 in the Dance Department, she subsequently hosted two more S&Ps. 

Dr. Johnson joins DBS as an Associate Professor and is currently Vice Chair of Dance. She is co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Hip Hop Dance Studies (2023), and the author of Dark Matter in Breaking Cyphers: the Life of Africanist Aesthetics in Global Hip Hop (OUP 2023), which explores the unseen or invisiblized Africanist aesthetics embedded in the ritual dance circle (called the cypher) that is essential to global Hip Hop.

Office: ARTS 206 

Desireé R. Melonas is an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Black Study and Political Science. Her research focuses on the rhythmic and inductive aspects of racialized place, black feminist new materialisms, and the politics of radical care. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Women, Politics & Policy, National Review of Black Politics, Meridians, Theory and Event, and Women’s Studies Quarterly: WSQ. In addition, she is a co-principal investigator on a National Academies of the Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Gulf Research Program Grant to co-develop environmental justice-focused curricular interventions throughout schools in and around Africatown, Alabama. Finally, Desireé is a 2020-2021 Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellow and an aspiring doula. 

Office: Watkins 2233

Research is invested in how black folx strive to embrace personal and communal psychic wholeness through circulating/constructing black subjectivities, knowledges, culture, spiritualities, and the manufacturing of black and radical realities. Through rhetoric (language and meaning-making), literature, and black life, black folx survive and thrive in an atmosphere of antiblackness.

Teaching at UCR since 2004, Vorris L. Nunley is a Black Study and English department member. His primary areas of interest are rhetoric (symbols and the manufacturing of realities), African American literature (post-1945, speculative fiction),  depth psychology (Religion and spirituality, myth), public pedagogy, and neoliberalism. He writes and speaks about black and other unofficial, subjugated, and hidden knowledges and ways of being. In keeping with the Black Study requirement of community connection, Dr. Nunley teaches and engages with teachers and students on and off campus. He works with honors and residential life. Has traveled with students and community members to Africa and throughout California; organized cultural tours and visits to see various speakers, bookstores, and museums. As a former acting Chair, he is involved in establishing Black Study on campus and its investment in black, Black Trans knowledges and ways of being in an increasingly antiblack world.

Office: HMNSS 3005 

Dylan’s lifework focuses on liberationist, anticolonial, and abolitionist confrontations with the antiblack, colonial, and white supremacist violences that permeate the ongoing Civilization project. He is devoted to studying and teaching the historical, collective genius of rebellion, survival, and insurgent futurity that radically challenge dominant forms of authority, power, and institutionality.

Dylan Rodríguez is a teacher, scholar, organizer and collaborator who has maintained a day job as a Professor at the University of California-Riverside since 2001. He is a faculty member in the recently created Department of Black Study as well as the Department of Media and Cultural Studies. He was elected to serve as President of the American Studies Association in 2020-2021, and in 2020 was named to the inaugural class of Freedom Scholars. Since 2021, he has served as Co-Director of the Center for Ideas and Society, where he created the Decolonizing Humanism(?) programming stream.

Since the late-1990s, Dylan has participated as a founding member of organizations like Critical Resistance, Abolition Collective, Critical Ethnic Studies Association, Cops Off Campus, Scholars for Social Justice, and the UCR Department of Black Study, among others. 

He is the author of three books, most recently White Reconstruction: Domestic Warfare and the Logic of Racial Genocide (Fordham University Press, 2021), which won the 2022 Frantz Fanon Book Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association. 

Office: CHASS Interdisciplinary-South | Room 3154

Emerging from collaborative efforts in Brazil and the United States, Black collective inventions structure the written work listed under this name. Engendering alternatives to the foundational and current dynamics of social death and early physical death by preventable causes, such inventions pursue the imagination and practice of Black life worlds. To seek horizons beyond planetary antiblackness, which define the anthropocene, is to reconfigure the codes of our social and ontological existence and to engage the endless collective process of abolition.

Emergindo de esforços colaborativos no Brasil e nos Estados Unidos, invenções coletivas negras estruturam as publicações listadas com esse nome. Ao gerar alternativas às dinâmicas fundamentais e correntes de morte social e morte física prematura por causas evitáveis, tais invenções buscam a imaginação e prática de mundos de vida negros. Vislumbrar horizontes para além da antinegritude mundial, que define o antropoceno, significa reconfigurar os códigos de nossa existência social e ontológica, e mergulhar no processo infinito de abolição.

Sage Ni’Ja Whitson – inaugural permanent chair (they/them) – is an international multiple award-winning Queer Transgender artist, writer, and futurist, noted by Brooklyn Magazine as a culture influencer and the Park Avenue Amory as a “trailblazing XR artist to know”. They are a Herb Alpert/MacDowell Fellow, United States Artist Fellow, Creative Capital and two-time “Bessie” Awardee who engages anti-disciplinarity through a critical intersection of the sacred and conceptual in science, technology, and art. Their multi-form works on dark matter and dark energy, via The Unarrival Experiments, have been commissioned across the world and media, including recently at the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC), Black Speculative Arts Movement – Denver, and an upcoming solo exhibition at the California African American Museum. Their manuscript, Transtraterrestrial: Dark Matter in Black Divinities is slated to be published by Wesleyan University Press, 2025. Whitson is a sought-after speaker, consultant, presenter, and  masterclass facilitator, whose offerings have been shared among notable institutions and arts organizations: Princeton, Cornell, LAX Festival, Movement Research, 2020 keynote of the Collegium for African Diasporic Dance conference, and UNESCO.

Dr. Jaye Austin Williams is a critically acclaimed actor, director and playwright, as well as a scholar who specializes in the analysis of drama, cinema, performance, queer and feminist theories through critical Black study. Her research and teaching focus on the structural and global implications of antiblackness, and how their myriad, violent performances – both subtle and overt – emanate from the collective unconscious within global modernity. She received her MFA in Dramatic Writing from NYU, and her PhD in Drama and Theatre, with a Critical Theory emphasis, from UC Irvine. Currently Associate Professor and Chair of the Dept. of Critical Black Studies at Bucknell University, she will join the faculty in the new Dept. of Black Study at the University of California, Riverside in fall 2025. 

After her 30-year career in the professional theatre, Dr. Williams’ graduate study shifted her critical lens from theatre and drama to Black Study, within which the prior, along with cinema, have now become her objects of inquiry. Through Black Study as her critical practice, she continually reexamines the processes through which these aesthetic fields both reveal and occlude how antiblackness circulates dynamically and saturates the global sphere by way of the individual and collective (societal and institutional) unconscious drives which exact it.