Research Bio

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 structural 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 and Camera Obscura; 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.

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. While at Stanford, he was a founding member of the Black Studies Collective, and received the Outstanding Mentoring and Teaching Award from the Department of African & African American Studies as well as the Middlebrook Teaching Prize from the Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. He was previously an Assistant Professor of Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Wesleyan University. 

Research Expertise and Interest

19th and 20th century African American literature, black intellectual histories, black feminist, queer, and trans theories, black critical theory, aesthetics and visual culture, performance studies