Alexander Weheliye
Professor of African American Studies
Research Interests:
African American, Afro-European, and Afro-Caribbean Literatures and Cultures
Critical Theory
Popular Culture
History and Theory of Information Technologies
German Studies (modern German philosophy and literature, minority discourse in Germany)
Post-Colonial Studies
Critical Ethnic Studies
Popular Music
Race and Technology
Afrofuturism
Courses:
AFAM 331 African American Novel
Degree:
Rutgers University, Ph.D.
Current Research:
Alexander G. Weheliye is professor of African American Studies at Northwestern University where he teaches black literature and culture, critical theory, social technologies, and popular culture. He is the author of Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity (Duke University Press, 2005), which was awarded The Modern Language Association's William Sanders Scarborough Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Study of Black American Literature or Culture and Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (2014, Duke UP).
Currently, he is working on two projects. The first, Modernity Hesitant: The Civilizational Diagnostics of W.E.B. Du Bois and Walter Benjamin, tracks the different ways in which these thinkers imagine the marginal as central to the workings of modern civilization. The second, Feenin: R&B’s Technologies of Humanity, offers a critical history of the intimate relationship between R&B music and technology since the late 1970’s.
His work has been published and is forthcoming in American Literary History, The BlackScholar, boundary 2, Criticism, CR: The New Centennial Review, The Journal of Visual Culture, Public Culture, Small Axe, Social Text, and the anthologies Black Europe and the African Diaspora, The Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music Studies, The Contemporary African American Novel, Wie Rassismus aus Wörtern spricht: (K)erben des Kolonialismus im Wissensarchiv deutsche Sprache, Remapping Black Germany,and re/visionen: Postkoloniale Perspektiven von People of Color auf Rassismus, Kulturpolitik und Widerstand in Deutschland.
Recent Awards:
2005 William Sanders Scarborough Prize, Modern Language Association
Recent Publications:
Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human, Duke University Press (2014)
Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity, Duke University Press (2005)
Specific interests to Comparative Literary Studies: African-American and Afro-Diasporic literature and culture; critical theory; popular culture