Biography

I am currently an Associate Professor of Philosophy with a joint appointment in English at the University of Rhode Island where I teach courses in Existentialism and Africana philosophy, as well as Black literary theory and African American fiction.

My first book, The Buck, the Black and the Existential Hero (Northwestern UP, 2020) combines literary theory with black existential philosophy in an analysis of Ralph Ellison, Frederick Douglass, Percival Everette, and Cecil Brown. The Buck investigates the role of theatricality in black male life and within black male literature to demonstrate the ways that black male life is itself akin to an up-close magical act meant for both deception and self-protection. 

My second book, The Dark Delight of Being Strange (forthcoming with Columbia UP) further explores the relation between philosophy and black literature, this text interrogates the imagination and memory in terms of how we think about and engage with time and space. In particular, it is interested in how we construct the past, arguing that our rendering of the past and the archive of the past is the product of the speculative imagination. Dark Delight is an attempt to retell the past and reimagine the archive through an engagement with the black speculative imagination.  

Although I am formally trained in philosophy, I have always been interested in black literary fiction and how it can be mined and written to reveal philosophical ideas. My current project, This, too Shall Pass stands firmly in the realm of literary fiction, combining Afrosurrealism and Afrofuturist tropes and modes of literary construction. Given that this text is my first fully fictional collection, it holds a special place in my writing and thinking career in that I am now stepping out of the analysis mode and into fiction writing and world-crafting mode. I feel what this text brings that is unique is a philosophical perspective along with a black cultural and aesthetic sensibility, allowing me to navigate black social, political, and literary issues with keen philosophical insight.