Amber Rose Johnson
Black studies, contemporary, experimental, poetry, performance, embodiment.
My current research is a continuation and expansion of my dissertation, “Bad Mathematics: Black Experimental Poetry and Performance in 21st Century Diaspora”. In this project, I witness how contemporary Black cultural producers wield analogies culled from math, physics, and material sciences in their creative work in an effort to radically deconstruct the formalizations that attempt to define Blackness, humanness, and categories of difference. I am also working on a secondary research project animated by Christina Sharpe’s question, “What does it take to keep breath in the Black body?” I pursue an exploration of this question through embodied movement and specifically, through my strength-training practice working primarily with kettlebells.
Questions that motivate my research:
How do artists and writers extend the efforts of critical humanists such as Sylvia Wynter and Franz Fanon in their creative work? How can interdisciplinary, anti-disciplinary, and un-disciplinary approaches to scholarship change the possibilities for knowledge production? What new shapes must Black Study take to meet the demands for liberation in our current moment?
M.A., Ph.D. English and Africana Studies (University of Pennsylvania)
B.A., American Studies and Africana Studies (Tufts University)
Public Writing
In the Running: On Malcolm Peacock’s We Served. . .and they felt tiny bursts along the horizon, ArtForum, 2022.
- McGill Third Century Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship, 2023
- Fulbright Research Fellowship, 2015-2016
I will begin working with graduate students in Fall 2024. At that time, I will welcome expressions of interests in supervision from graduate students interested in Black feminisms, Black study, critical humanisms, experimental cultural production, and 20th and 21st century poetry and performance. Additionally, I am excited to work with students who may work in other fields, but who also have methodological interests in interdisciplinary research, embodied embodied/experimental/experiential research, and other modes of critical-creative practice.