(he/him) is a multi-method, (un)inter-disciplined PhD student in the Department of African Diaspora Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. His research engages questions of Black visuality, mourning, madness, and the aesthetics of embodiment. He earned a B.A. from Swarthmore College with a double major in English Literature and a specialized major in Black Studies entitled “Visual Cultures and Literature of the African Diaspora” as a Mellon Mays Fellow.
Brandon’s writing considers mourning as both an affective and political practice. He is in conversation with cultural producers who operate on frequencies outside Western cis-heteropatriarchal ontologies and who commune with the dead. His work has been recognized with the Philip M. Hicks Prize for Literary Criticism, and his recent essay, “A Grammar for Holding Onto A Rose,” is published in Issue 8 of the Black Embodiments Studio journal, A Year in Black Art
Knowing intimately that theoretical engagement cannot be separated from praxis, his research and consulting have contributed to the creation of an in-person youth space in Philadelphia, litigation efforts, and comprehensive reports on human rights violations with an international assistance fund. Imagining a future in which we are free, his advocacy and lived experience led him to co-found the Philadelphia Black Students’ Alliance in 2020, featured in the anthology How We Stay Free: Notes on a Black Uprising (Rogers, 2022), and serve as Executive Director of the Philadelphia-based organization UrbEd, Inc.
Brandon is sustained by the intellectual traditions of his mother, Ralph Ellison, Elizabeth Alexander, Joseph Beam, Christina Sharpe, Sylvia Wynter, Kara Walker, Nick Cave, and Sun Ra—and by all those who indulge in illegibility.
Currently… reading James Baldwin or thinking about our Afro-futures.
