Robert Reid-Pharr

He was previously a Distinguished and Presidential Professor of English and American Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Before joining the Graduate Center he was an assistant and associate professor of English at the Johns Hopkins University. In addition, he has been the Jess and Sara Cloud Distinguished Visiting Professor of English at the College of William and Mary, the Edward Said Visiting Chair of American Studies at the American University of Beirut, the Drue Heinz Visiting Professor of English at the University of Oxford, and the Carlisle and Barbara Moore Distinguished Visiting Professor of English at the University of Oregon. He holds a Ph.D. in American Studies and an M.A. in African American Studies from Yale University and a B.A. in Political Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

A specialist in African American culture and a prominent scholar in the field of race and sexuality studies, Reid-Pharr has published four books: Archives of Flesh: African America, Spain, and Post-Humanist Critique (NYU Press, 2016), Conjugal Union: The Body, the House, and the Black American (Oxford University Press, 1999); Black, Gay, Man: Essays (NYU Press, 2001); and Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, and the Black American Intellectual (NYU Press, 2007). His essays have appeared in, among other places, American Literature, American Literary History, Callaloo, Afterimage, Small Axe, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Women and Performance, Social Text, Transition, Studies in the Novel, The African American Review, Feminist Formations, Art in America, and Radical America.

Reid-Pharr serves on the editorial boards of Studies in American Fiction and Social Text and he is a member of the editorial advisory committee of the journal, Callaloo. His research and writing have been supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. In 2015 he was inducted into the Johns Hopkins Society of Scholars. He is the recipient of a 2016 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship for his forthcoming work, Archives of Flesh: African America, Spain, and Post-Humanist Critique. He lives in Brooklyn.