Henry Washington Jr.

Assistant Professor of African American Studies, UC Berkeley

Henry Washington, Jr. is an interdisciplinary scholar of race, gender, and aesthetics. He is an assistant professor of African American studies and the founding director of the Black Critical Theory Initiative at the University of California, Berkeley. He is at work on two book projects. The first elucidates the shifts in the nature of power and the forms of Black cultural production effected by the postbellum emergence of “the criminal” as an alleged exemplar of race and gender alterity. The second surfaces the sound of suffering in Black gospel music generally silenced to hear Black resilience and possibility.

Photo credit: Kedrick Walker