Our March 2025 Departmental Spotlight features Assistant Professor Henry Washington Jr., interviewed by Graduate Student Endria Richardson.
Tell me about your work. What do you care about in the world, and how did you come to care about it?
My work is broadly concerned with the centrality of cultural representation to the logic of antiblackness and, in turn, to black people’s efforts to contend with the antiblackness of the world. I was initially politicized by the state-sanctioned murders of Trayvon...
AAS is launching a new section of our newsletter, Departmental Spotlights, organized by Graduate Student Endria Richardson. Our first spotlight features an interview with graduate student Karina Karbo-Wright.
Tell me about your work (whatever “work” means to you). What do you care about in the world, and how did you come to care about it?
My research interest is in Black film - specifically this intersection of horror and trauma that Black creatives and spectators consume from. Exploring these articulations gives deeper...
AAS is launching a new section of our newsletter, Departmental Spotlights, organized by Graduate Student Endria Richardson. Our first spotlight features an interview with graduate student Karina Karbo-Wright.
Tell me about your work (whatever “work” means to you). What do you care about in the world, and how did you come to care about it?
My research interest is in Black film - specifically this intersection of horror and trauma that Black creatives and spectators consume from. Exploring these articulations gives...
The University of California, Berkeley, is making a hopeful case for African American studies amid attacks on academic freedom.
Critical as they are to a healthy democracy, open conversations at public universities on race, history, and freedom are increasingly threatened by an array of attacks—from cuts to funding for humanities departments to...
Robert Lee Allen was lovely to me. He was certainly the calmest revolutionary I ever met. My first association with The Black Scholar was publishing in it, an experience wholly started by Dr. Allen. After a traumatic, but ultimately successful QE experience, it was Robert that helped me find my confidence again. JFinley and I were his GSIs for 5B, and he asked us each to do a guest lecture based on our own work. Then he asked me to review one of his articles. Then he asked that I be invited to participate in the symposium for the 40th anniversary of his Black Awakening in...
I first met Robert when he was on the Board of the Oakland Men’s Project, a group in Oakland working with men to educate young men and boys about violence against women.
I couldn't believe my eyes, or my heart. Here was this gorgeous, dimpled, well-read, smart, accomplished, empathetic, introspective man with acute intuitive intellect, who was a social justice warrior with a sense of humor and adventure, and one of only a few men in the country dedicating himself to ending violence against women, which was also my job then at Futures without Violence.
Darieck Scott’s The Dream-Slaves is a queer, science fiction odyssey that pulses with themes of liberation, identity, and survival amid dystopian forces. Published by Punctum Books in September 2024, Scott’s novel transports readers to Norio—a city where reality and magic blur, and the boundaries of humanity itself are contested. The Dream-Slaves is now available for review, and we hope you'll consider...
