Matthieu Chapman earned his MLitt in Dramaturgy and MFA in Acting from Mary Baldwin College’s Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature in Performance Program and his Ph.D. in Theatre History, Theory, and Criticism from the UC San Diego Department of Theatre and Dance. He has acted on the American Shakespeare Center’s Blackfriar’s stage and served as a dramaturg for San Diego Repertory Theatre and worked for the La Jolla Playhouse, as well as dramaturged and directed numerous university productions. His research focuses on ontological structures of blackness in the Early Modern World. His monograph, Antiblack Racism in Early Modern English Drama: The Other is available from Routledge Press. He has also published articles in Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, Theatre Topics, TheatreForum, and Early Theatre. He has presented at numerous national and international conferences, including the Renaissance Society of America, the American Society of Theatre Research, the American Comparative Literature Association, the Mid-America Theatre Conference, and others.
Zakiyyah Iman Jackson is an assistant professor of English at the University of Southern California. Working at the intersection of African diasporic literature and visual culture, philosophical metaphysics, and science studies, her research explores historical and emergent linkages between the humanities and the sciences on the question of being. Professor Jackson’s book in progress, titled Being and Blackness: Matter and Meaning After Man (forthcoming NYU Press), clarifies the nature of the proximity between blackness and animality in the history of Western science and philosophy and investigates black literary, visual artistic, and philosophical interventions into the reciprocal production of discourses of racialization and speciation. Professor Jackson has published work in Feminist Studies (2014), Gay and Lesbian Quarterly (2011 and 2015), Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences (2016), Catalyst:Feminism, Theory, and Technoscience (2016), and South Atlantic Quarterly (2018).
Joy James, F.C. Oakley 3rd C. Professor of Humanities at Williams College, is the author of Seeking the Beloved Community; Transcending the Talented Tenth; Resisting State Violence; Shadowboxing: Representations of Black Feminist Politics. James is also editor of States of Confinement; The New Abolitionists; Imprisoned Intellectuals; Warfare in the American Homeland; The Angela Y. Davis Reader; and The Black Feminist Reader (co-edited with T. D. Sharpley-Whiting). Lead co-editor of the 2016 Abolition Collective Election Blog, James’s writings have appeared in the NYT, Boston Review, Black Scholar, Critical Sociology, Viewpoint, AAIHS, as well as other publications and anthologies.
James’s forthcoming works include: monographs on Angela Y. Davis and the Eclipse of the Revolutionary Era; and, The Central Park Case; as well as an edited anthology on the Captive Maternal based on her article “The Womb of Western Theory.”
Zine Magubane is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Boston College. Her work has been published in Gender and Society, Signs, Feminist Africa, and Critical Sociology. She is currently at work on a book: American Sociology’s Racial Ontology: Slavery, Colonialism, and the Making of Science of Society.
John Murillo III is Assistant Professor of African American Studies at the University of California, Irvine. His primary research interests are Black speculative fiction, critical theory, quantum mechanics, and popular media (especially comic books and graphic novels). He is finalizing his current project, Impossible Stories: On the Time and Space of Black Creation with The Ohio State University Press.
Selamawit D. Terrefe is an Assistant Professor of African American literature and culture in the Department of English at Tulane University, where she also holds affiliations with the Africana Studies Program and Stone Center for Latin American Studies. Before coming to Tulane, Terrefe was a postdoctoral fellow in Black Atlantic Studies at the University of Bremen, Germany, in the department of English Speaking Cultures. She has presented internationally at workshops at the Tate Modern in London, the Max Plank institute in Goettingen, Germany, and Rhodes University in South Africa, and has publications in The Feminist Wire, Theory and Event, Rhizomes, and forthcoming with Random House’s One World Print. As a critical theorist and scholar of Global Black literary, visual, and cultural studies, her goal is to foreground the vibrancy of Black aesthetics without reinscribing a chimeric value to the political import of Black radical intellectual and social life. Attending to the intersections between race and gender, popular culture and fantasy, and violence and desire, she deploys multidisciplinary interventions to generate alternative paradigms of thought regarding race, sex, gender, the Black intramural, and revolutionary politics.