Dr. Selamawit D. Terrefe

Selamawit D. Terrefe is an Assistant Professor of African American literature and culture in the Department of English at Tulane University and the 2022-2024 Williams College Faculty Fellow for their Mellon 'Just Futures' project. Her research, broadly speaking, centers on questions concerning racial violence, specifically the ostensible intractability of antiblack violence, as a global phenomenon. As such, her research and teaching interests include Global Black Studies, Critical Theory, Psychoanalysis, Gender and Sexuality, Continental Philosophy, and radical and revolutionary social movements. As an interdisciplinary scholar, Terrefe challenges prevailing theorizations of African diaspora, postcolonial melancholia, and violence, examining hegemonic conceptions of racial slavery as not only a facet of the modern era, with the birth of capital, but also the sole purview of the global North.

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The timeliness, public resonance, and significance of Terrefe’s scholarship has garnered international recognition. Prior to her position at Tulane, she was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship in Black Atlantic Studies at the University of Bremen, Germany. Her training in the United States, teaching of African diasporic thought and culture in a transnational context, and interdisciplinary background earned her a multi-year fellowship and her current research continues to engage and press the boundaries of Black Critical Theory.