Education

2018 Hampton University, B.A.
2021 Emory University, M.A.
2024 Emory University, Ph.D.

Courses Taught

Reading Locally and Globally (Theme: The Black Fantastic)
Identity and Difference (Theme: Race, Desire, Beauty)
Topics in Drama (Theme: Caribbean Ecology & Performance)
Women's Literature (Theme: Witches of Color)

Career Specialties

Brenton Boyd is Assistant Professor of Black Studies in the Department of English & Writing and the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program. Their research traces networks of sexual desire, death, shame, and fantasy among black femmes in the Caribbean and US South. They frequently write and lecture on such subjects as queer of color critique, black feminist thought, visual and performing arts, Africana religions (esp. Hoodoo), literary theory, and speculative fiction.

Professional and Community Activities

Professor Boyd's first book project — World Wrecking: Blackness, Eschatology, and Performance — channels the work of Sylvia Wynter into an apocalyptic theology informed by the magico-religious cultures of the Greater Caribbean. They have also begun a second book project — The Black Bottom: Sexual Underworlds & Spectral Transpossessions — which is a shadow history of black queer and transfemme death doulas, sex workers, performance artists, fictional characters, and rootworkers in the US South.

Their scholarship has been generously supported by the Mellon Mays Graduate Initiative, the Institute for the Recruitment of Teachers, the Institute for Citizens & Scholars, UNCF, Virginia Humanities, and many others. You can read their work in such academic venues as liquid blackness, Syndicate Theology, and Duke University Press's forthcoming edited collection Esoteric Inhumanisms.