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 and Beauty)
Topics in Drama (Theme: Caribbean Ecology and Performance)
Women's Literature (Theme: Witches of Color)

Career Specialties

Brenton Boyd is the assistant professor of Black studies in the Department of English and 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 U.S. 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

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 U.S. 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.