Dionte Harris (he/him) teaches 20th and 21st century African American literature, film, and cultural studies at the University of Tennessee. He specializes in Black studies, critical theory, queer and trans theory, and gender studies. His current project, tentatively titled Boyhood: Black Becoming, Queer Being, and the Question of Life, examines the figure of the queer black boy in contemporary African American literary and cultural productions. By exploring how black writers and artists use queer black boys and boyhoods to complicate discourses on black sexualities, black queer masculinities, and black childhoods, his project argues that the queer black boy functions as a key figure, trope, and site of analysis in contemporary African American literary and cultural productions. His project reconstructs how scholars theorize childhood and masculinity but also provides more nuanced methods for approaching blackness and queerness and the varied ways in which they inflect the trajectories of childhood and masculinity. Dionte Harris is also at work on a project that examines how Black artists mobilize mathematic and scientific knowledge to offer alternative understandings of and relationships to Black and queer life and reveal novel ways to consider the “social life” of mathematics and science; modes of racial, gender, and sexual analysis and “experimentation”; and contemporary African American cultural productions. Dionte earned his PhD and MA from the University of Virginia and BA from the University of Maryland, College Park.