Assistant Professor
Biography
Dionte Harris (he/they) 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, performance studies, and visual culture. His current project, tentatively titled Boyhood: Black Becoming, Queer Being, and the Question of Life, uses contemporary African American cultural production to read against the grain of Western liberal humanisms that convict Black boys as super predators or felons-in-the-making and thus exposes the figure of the Child as central to Western processes of racialization, gendering, sexualization, and, more broadly, to the perpetuation of Man as the only way to be human. Dionte 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.
Education
- Ph.D., University of Virginia, 2022
- M.A., University of Virginia, 2019
- B.A., University of Maryland, College Park, 2016
Publications
- “The Smear: Vibrational Flesh and the Calculus of Black Queer Becoming in Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight.” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 33.1 (2022): 1–27.
Fellowships & Grants
- Provost’s Predoctoral Fellowship for Excellence, University of Pennsylvania
- Buckner W. Clay Awards in the Humanities, UVA
- Dean’s Dissertation Completion Fellowship, UVA
- LGBTS Visitorship, Yale
- Ford Predoctoral Fellowship, Ford Foundation