Indiana U
Biographical Sketch: John Brooks is a Core Visiting Assistant Professor at Boston College. He was previously a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry at Emory University, and earned his Ph.D. at Indiana University. His published research has appeared in—or is forthcoming from—PMLA, African American Review, and J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists. He recently finished a book manuscript titled The Racial Unfamiliar: Encountering Illegibility in African American Literature and Culture. Across its six chapters, he identifies a cohort of twenty-first-century Black authors and artists who have turned to abstractionist aesthetics to complicate and confuse how we think and see race.