Research Expertise and Interest

19th and 20th century African American literature, black intellectual history, black feminist theory, black trans theory, black visual culture and aestetics, performance theory

Research Description

Henry Washington, Jr. is an assistant professor in the Department of African American Studies & African Diaspora Studies. His research broadly explores how dominant constructions of cultural difference help justify the persistence of inequality in the era of inclusion, as well as how minoritarian cultural forms attempt to contest these constructions and produce more complex truths about Humanness. He is at work on his first book project, Looking to Be Included: Social Science, Black Imagination, and the Culture of the Criminal, 1896-, which elucidates the shifts in the nature of power and in the forms of black cultural production effected by the postbellum emergence of “the criminal” as an alleged exemplar of race and gender alterity. His writing appears or is forthcoming in the peer-reviewed journals Women & Performance(link is external) and Camera Obscura(link is external); the edited keyword collection Think from Black: A Lexicon; and the exhibition catalog for the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive’s New Time: Art & Feminisms in the 21st Century(link is external).

Washington earned his B.A. in English and African & African American Studies at Duke University, and his M.A. in English and Ph.D. in Modern Thought & Literature at Stanford University. He was a founding member of the Black Studies Collective at Stanford, as well as a recipient of both its Department of African & African American Studies’ Outstanding Mentoring and Teaching Award in 2020 and its Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies’ Middlebrook Teaching Prize in 2022. He was previously an Assistant Professor of Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Wesleyan University.