Henry Washington Jr.

Henry Washington, Jr. is an Assistant Professor in the Department of African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is also the founder and convener of the Black Critical Theory Initiative. His research broadly explores how dominant constructions of cultural difference help justify the persistence of antiblackness in the era of inclusion, as well as how black cultural forms attempt to contest these constructions and produce more complex truths about Humanness. He is at work on his first book project, Looking to Be Included: Black Political Desire and the Culture of the Criminal, which explores the messy intramural politics of representation at issue in how turn-of-the-twentieth-century black artists contended with the cultural-scientific “truth” claims of black criminality. In so doing, the project rethinks how antiblackness shapes the formation of black consciousness and, in turn, the making of the black aesthetic tradition. He is also at work on a second project tracing the sound of black suffering in the gospel music tradition. His writing appears or is forthcoming in the peer-reviewed journals Women & Performance and Camera Obscura; the edited keyword collection Thinking from Black: A Lexicon; and the exhibition catalog for the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive’s New Time: Art & Feminisms in the 21st Century.

Washington earned his B.A. in English and African & African American Studies from Duke University, and his M.A. in English and Ph.D. in Modern Thought & Literature at Stanford University. At Stanford, he was a founding member of the Black Studies Collective, and received both the Outstanding Mentoring and Teaching Award from the Department of African & African American Studies and the Middlebrook Teaching Prize from the Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. He was previously an Assistant Professor at Wesleyan University.