Cogut Institute for the Humanities

Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman is Associate Professor of American Studies and English at Brown University. She is a two-time winner of the Darwin T. Turner Award for best essay of the year in African American Review and winner of the 2020 GL/Q Caucus’ Crompton-Noll Essay Prize. She has also been awarded fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the American Association of University Women, the Mellon Foundation, the W.E.B. Du Bois Research Institute at Harvard University, and the John F. Kennedy Institute at the Freie Universität, Berlin. She is the author of Against the Closet: Black Political Longing and the Erotics of Race (Duke University Press, 2012). Her second book, Millennial Style: The Politics of Experiment in Contemporary African Diasporic Culture, is forthcoming from Duke University Press in early 2024. Additional scholarship has appeared in such venues as African American Review, GL/Q, The Black Scholar, ASAP/Journal, The Faulkner Journal, American Literary History, and James Baldwin Review, among other scholarly journals and critical anthologies. She is the guest editor of the forthcoming special issue of The Faulkner Journal examining Faulkner’s canon in light of race, racism, and the work of antiracism.