Joshua Brandon Bennett

Dr. Bennett’s teaching and research interests include 20th and 21st century African American literature, environmental studies, black poetics, animality studies and affect theory. His first collection of critical prose, Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man, focuses on both the literary imagination and broader set of ethical concerns that have emerged from African American experiences of being configured as socio-legal nonpersons: a sub-genre of the human, always already positioned in fraught proximity to animal life. By working at the intersections of black studies and animality studies, his goal is to illumine the ways in which the black radical tradition provides us with the tools necessary to conceive of interspecies relation anew, and to ultimately abolish the forms of anti-black thought—i.e., the figure of the black as a kind of intermediate category separating beast and Man—that have historically served to maintain the caesura between human and animal.

Dr. Bennett is also currently at work on a book of narrative nonfiction, Spoken Word: A Cultural History, which is forthcoming from Knopf.