Team Category: Faculty

Stephanie Jones is invested in how spatial logics produce abjection which continues to result in forced migration for Black communities. Using housing development as a modality of the production of order, Steph interrogates how subjectivity is (re)imagined under modernity. Her work sits at the axis of human geography and sociology as she theorizes dispossession through…

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, feminist and disability theories through critical Black study. Her research and teaching focus on the structural and global implications of antiblackness, and how its myriad, violent performances –…

Sage Ni’Ja Whitson, Professor (they/them) – is an international multiple award-winning Queer Transgender artist, writer, and medicine worker, noted by Brooklyn Magazine as a culture influencer and the Park Avenue Amory as a “trailblazing XR artist to know”. They are a DAAD Artist-in-Berlin Visual Arts Fellow, Herb Alpert/MacDowell Fellow, United States Artist Fellow, Creative Capital and two-time…

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…

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,…

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…

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,…

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…

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…

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…