SELAMAWIT D. TERREFE
Assistant Professor
Department of English
Tulane University
Norman Mayer Hall, New Orleans, LA 70118
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EDUCATION_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
PhD English, University of California, Irvine
MA English, University of California, Irvine
MA Humanities and Social Thought, New York University
BA English Literature, University of California, Berkeley
ACADEMIC APPOINTMENTS___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
2022-2024 Mellon Just Futures Faculty Fellow, American Studies
Williams College
2018 - Assistant Professor, Department of English
present Tulane University
Africana Studies Program, Affiliated Faculty
Stone Center for Latin American Studies, Affiliated Faculty
2016 - 2018 Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin, Department of English-Speaking Cultures
University of Bremen, Germany
PUBLICATIONS__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Peer-reviewed Journal Articles
“Black Surfeit, Black Grief: Not of Meaning nor Measure,” Political Theology, 2023, DOI: 10.1080/1462317X.2023.2281823
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“Death Rattle Not Dashikis: Nikki Giovanni’s Black Judgement Meets Hannah Arendt,” Philosophy Today, Philosophy Documentation Center, 2023. Crossref, doi:10.5840/philtoday2023104502
“Cathexis in Black: on Lou Andreas-Salomé’s “‘Anal’ and ‘Sexual,’” Psychoanalysis & History 24.1 (2022): 41-67 (response essay).
“The Pornotrope of Decolonial Feminism.” Critical Philosophy of Race 8.1-2 (2020): 134-164.
“Speaking the Hieroglyph: Black Women and Mimetic Thaumaturgy.” Theory and Event 21.1 (2018): 124-147)
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Works-in-Progress and Under Review
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“Impossible Blackness: Violence and the Psychic Life of Slavery” (book, in progress)
“The Poetics of the Black Corpse and the Urbild of Politics,” Polity (symposia, under review, 2024)
“Lateral Abyss: Antiblackness and Jouissance, the Interminable,” Afropessimism, Antiblackness and Lacan (in progress, 2024).
“Psycho-politics: Lost or Missing?” Political Concepts, Ed. Michael Sawyer, Fordham University Press, (in progress, 2024).
“Of Monsters and Murder: The Racial Politics of Opacity in Discourses on Femicide” (in progress)
“Violence by Any Other Name: The Impasse of Black Female Sexuality” (in progress)
“The Position of the ‘Unthot’: From Ratchet to Revolution” (in progress)
“Carceral Speculations on the ‘Black Maternal’: Futurity and Foreclosure in Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing” (in progress)
Encyclopedia Entries (peer-reviewed)
“Afro-pessimism” (with Frank B, Wilderson, III and Patrice Douglass). Oxford Bibliographies in African
American Studies, Ed. Gene Jarrett, Oxford University Press, 2018.
“Black Women Writers in the United States.” Oxford Bibliographies in African American Studies, Ed. Gene Jarrett, Oxford University Press, Spring 2016.
Interviews
“La fabrique de l'absence: le féminisme décolonial et négrophobie [Crafting of absence: Decolonial feminism and antiBlackness],” interview with Selamawit Terrefe by Fania Noel, Passerelle no. 24, March 2023.
“What Exceeds the Hold?: An Interview with Christina Sharpe.” Rhizomes 29, Ed. Dalton Anthony Jones, Spring 2016.
Book Review
Review of Frank B. Wilderson, III, Afropessimism (Liveright Publishing, 2020) for The Georgia Review (solicited).
Public Scholarship and Creative Work
“Phantasmagoria: or, The World is a Haunted Plantation.” The Feminist Wire (2012): n. pag. Web. 10 October 2012.
“It Relief.” Strange Tales of an Unreal West. San Francisco: Strangewest Productions, 2004.
INVITED TALKS__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
2024 “Limits of Legibility: The Questions of Blackness and Sexuality,” in conversation with David Marriott, Lee Edelman, and Joan Copjec hosted by differences, Brown University, Providence, RI
2023 “Race, Power, and the Psyche: Violence at the Corridors of Psychoanalysis,” ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry, Berlin, Germany
2023 “Poiesis and Theoria: Black Judgement and the Aporia of Black Revolutionary Politics," The New School, New York, NY
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2022 “Para-ontologies of Terror,” The Futures of American Studies Summer Institute, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH
2021 “Damnation is the Only Gift to Bear and Debt to Carry,” Earth, World, Ethics: Conversations in Black and Caribbean Studies (virtual), Wesleyan Center for the Humanities, Wesleyan University
2021 “Lateral Abyss: Antiblackness and the Interminable,” Diasporas: d’une terre, l’autre. Dialogues
Transdisciplinaires (virtual), University of Chicago in Paris, the University of Toulouse and the University Institute of France, Paris, France
2021 “Death and the Object’s Desire,” Black Thought, Black Subjects: States of Permanent War (virtual), University of Louisiana at Lafayette
2021 “Embracing Hatred,” Black Box Speaker Series (virtual), University of California, Irvine
2021 “A Counterfeit Inheritance and the Hypotaxis of Policing,” Critique/Black/Feminism(s) (virtual), Williams College
2020 “Absence and the Telos of Myth,” Keynote for The Roundtable for Black Feminist and Womanist Theory (virtual), Penn State University
2020 “Psycho-Politics,” Political Concepts’ virtual conference, “Racial Justice in the Age of Plague”
2020 “Antiblackness and the Politics of Demonology.” Plenary speaker for Political Demonologies: Race, Gender, and Coloniality in a Postsecular Age, University College Dublin, Ireland (cancelled due to COVID-19)
2020 “On Ambivalence,” Society of Fellows in the Humanities Thursday Lecture Series, Columbia University
2019 “Rupture and Relation: The Future Imperfect and the Condition of Black Impossibility.” Keynote for Rupture and Relation: A Workshop on Black Critical Thought, Northwestern University
2019 “Impossible Blackness: African Diaspora, Speculating the Future Imperfect.” Globalizing American Studies, Tulane University
2018 “The Fantasy of 'After' and the Desire for Difference: Fantasy, Anxiety, Difference—the Figure of the Other in the Aftermaths of a Violent Political Transformation, Max Plank Institute, Göttingen, Germany
2017 “Gender, Blackness, and Captivity”: Blackness and Captivity workshop organized by Thick/er Black Lines Collective during “We Apologise for the Delay To Your Journey” residency, Tate Exchange, Tate Modern, London, England
2017 “Temporal Aphasia and Talking Flesh: Gender and the Practice of Antiblackness”: Black Feminist Futures:
Re-envisioning Gender and Sexuality in Global Black Communities, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
2016 A Cool Dip in the Exponential Implications of Water: Mini symposium on “A Cool Dip in the Barren Saharan Crick,” California State University, Long Beach
2016 “Revolutionary Praxis and the Semi(on)tics of Blackness”: Afropessimism as Critical Praxis, Frederick Douglass Institute for African and African American Studies annual New Directions Symposium, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY
2015 “Black Revolution, Black Revenants: Shaking Oneself to Dream”: Inspiring and Ensuring Individual Student Excellence (iRISE) annual program, University of California, Irvine
2015 “Black Social Movements and State Violence”: #BAM 2015—Building a Movement: Against Police Brutality, The New School, New York, NY
CONFERENCES AND SYMPOSIA_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Papers Presented
2020 “Imagining Decolonizing and Abolitionist Futures” conference, Abolition Collective Convergence, Toronto, CA, May (canceled due to COVID-19)
2020 “Policing in/as Pleasure: Whither Black Revolutionary Desire,” American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA), Chicago, IL (canceled due to COVID-19)
2020 “Carceral Speculations on the ‘Black Maternal’: Futurity and Foreclosure in Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing,” Modern Language Association (MLA), Seattle, WA
2019 “From Ratchet to Revolution: Absenting the Black Female Revolutionary,” CBWP (Collegium of Black Women Philosophers) and Diverse Lineages of Existentialism, Washington DC
2018 “A Living Death: Violence and the Black Psyche,” American Studies Association (ASA), Atlanta, GA
2018 “A Meditation on Time, Transness, and Blackness: On C. Riley Snorton’s Black on Both Sides,” Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP), Penn State, PA
2018 “Abject Testimony: Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and the Criminalization of Black Dissent,” African
Feminisms (AFEMS) Conference, Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa
2018 “The Pornotrope of Decolonial Feminism”: Toward Decolonial Feminisms: A Conference Inspired by the Work of María Lugones, Penn State University, PA
2017 “Of Water and Weather: A Morbid Calculus”: The African Literature Association (ALA), Yale University, New Haven, CT
2016 “The Quest for Freedom is Death’: State Violence and Black Bodies, Exploding the Transcendence/Immanence Divide”: American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA), Cambridge, MA
2015 “Ratchet as Revolution? Black Female Flesh and Political Violence in/as the Popular”: American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA), Seattle, WA
2014 “Black Fungibility and Resistance: The Slave Performs Gender in Naomi Wallace’s The Liquid Plain”:
University of California, Irvine Symposium on The Liquid Plain
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2014 “Phantasmagoria: or, The World is a Haunted Plantation,” African American Expression in Print and Digital Culture, Madison, WI
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2014 “Africans Waiting to Die: State of Breach, Foreclosure, and the Promise of Return in the work of
Hortense Spillers and David Marriott”: Roundtable with Hortense Spillers, UC Irvine Annual Undergraduate Critical Theory Conference, Irvine, CA
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2014 “Affective Binds: Intramural Violence and the Disarticulation of Racial Slavery in
Nuruddin Farah's Crossbones”: American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA), Capitals, NY, NY
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2014 “Technological Haunting: Blackness as Political Thaumaturgy”: Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS), Seattle, WA
2012 “Poetics of Relational Incapacity: Turning Mind in the Direction of Black Thought”: University of California, Irvine conference, Thinking Afro-Pessimism
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2011 “Ethnic Studies, Violence, and Power: Critical Apparatuses for the Discursive Black
Subject”: University of California, Riverside, inaugural Critical Ethnic Studies conference
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Panels Chaired
2020 “Legacies of Color” (co-chair), A Symposium on the Literary History of New Orleans, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA
2019 “The Crossings of Black Queer Internationalism,” African American Intellectual History Society
(AAIHS), University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI
2015 “Negotiating Flesh as a Site of Memory: Reconsidering the Semantic Field of Hortense Spillers”: Modern Language Association (MLA), Vancouver, Canada
Panels Organized
2019 "Blackness and the Afterlife of Slavery,” Black In/Visibilities Contested, 7th Biennial Afroeuropeans Network Conference, University Institute of Lisbon (ISCTE), Lisbon, Portugal
2017 “Afro-pessimism and Praxis: a Roundtable on Revolution”: Pedagogies of Dissent, American Studies Association (ASA), Chicago, IL, 2017
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2017 “‘Stepping Over the Dead’: Towards a Global Analytic of the ‘Afterlife of Slavery’”: African
Literature Association (ALA), Yale University, New Haven, CT
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2016 Black Matter: The Times and Spaces of Black Movement, Black Thought, and Black Creation” (co-organizer): American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA), Cambridge, MA
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2013 “Blackness and the Ethics of Perception: Black Women, Black Bodies, Black Text”: The Collegium for African American Research (CAAR) 10th International Conference, Decatur/Atlanta, GA
COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
2023 “Demystifying Anti-Blackness,” AfroPolitan Berlin, Berlin, Germany
2022 “An Ontology of Betrayal,” in conversation with Joy James and Frank B. Wilderson III:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8p3At6gl0zQ
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2019 “Truth-telling: Nikole Hannah-Jones, Selamawit D. Terrefe, and the 1619 Project,” Conversations in Color, Amistad Research Center
2017 “Fade to Black,” Audio Documentary and Discussion Guest for Vitamindecolonial:
https://www.mixcloud.com/Vitamin_D/fade-to-black-final-vitamin-d-episode/
FELLOWSHIPS AND GRANTS__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Mellon “Just Futures” Fellowship at Williams College, 2022-2024
Scholarly Residency Award, A Studio in the Woods, 2021
Carol Lavin Bernick Faculty Grant, Tulane University, 2019
COR International Travel Grant, Tulane University, 2019
Newcomb Fellowship, Newcomb College Institute at Tulane University, 2018
Impulse Grant, University of Bremen, 2017
DAAD, German Academic Exchange Service, Conference Travel Grant, 2017
University of Bremen, Germany, Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin, Department of English-Speaking
Cultures in the field of American/Black Atlantic Studies, 2016-20
UC/ New Center for Psychoanalysis Interdisciplinary Psychoanalytic Consortium, Lake Arrowhead, California, “Psychoanalysis, Economy, and Desire,” 2016
UC Interdisciplinary Psychoanalytic Consortium, Lake Arrowhead, California, “Ecologies of Fear, 2015
UC Interdisciplinary Psychoanalytic Consortium, Lake Arrowhead, California, “Love and Psychoanalysis,” 2014
UC Chancellor’s Fellowship in English, 2013
Hayman Dissertation Fellowship, 2013
UC Irvine Graduate Opportunity Fellowship, 2008-09
TEACHING EXPERIENCE________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Williams College
American Studies
2022-2024
Undergraduate Courses
Black Critical Theory, Black Avant-Garde (Spring 2024)
Race and Psychoanalysis: Slavery and the Psyche, Advanced Seminar
Tulane University
Department of English
2018-Present
Graduate Courses
Contemporary African American Literature and Black Critical Theory
Fundamentals of Literary Theory
Undergraduate Courses
Black Insurgencies, Senior Seminar
Literary Investigations, Introductory lecture course in Literary Theory
#Ratchet to Revolution: Race, Gender and Violence in African American Literature, Advanced Seminar
Toni Morrison and James Baldwin, Senior Seminar
Black Queer Literature and Film, Advanced Seminar
Black Insurgencies, Senior Seminar
Independent Study: Black Critical Theory
Independent Study: Ambiguous Horror
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Africana Studies
2019-2020
Honors Thesis Independent Study
University of Bremen, Germany
English-Speaking Cultures
2016-2018
Undergraduate Courses
Contemporary African American Literature, Advanced Seminar
Black Women Writers in the US, Advanced Seminar
Black Power to #BlackLivesMatter, Lecture Course
Advising Honors Thesis Co-Advisor, Africana Studies & Political Science,
Tulane University, Juharah Worku, “ICE'D Out: The Criminalization of Haitian Immigration in the US”
Outside Committee Member, Culture and Theory, University of California, Irvine
Taijia McDougal, “Blackness, Terminable and Interminable”
SERVICE__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Department
Executive Committee, Spring 2022
Review Committee, English Department, Tulane University, 2019-2020
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University
Newcomb Grant Committee, Tulane University, 2019-2022
Member of UC Irvine African American Student Experience Working Group, 2014-16
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Profession
External Reviewer, Philosophy at Oxford UP, 2022
External Reviewer, Philosophy at Bloomsbury, 2022
External Reviewer, Handbook of Global Social Theory, 2022
Co-founder, Black Internationalist Unions of the Abolition Journal Collective, 2020-2022
Editorial Board Member, Journal of Bioethics and Black Studies, 2020-
Editorial Board Member, Unthought: A Journal of Afropessimism, 2020-
External Reviewer, GLQ, 2020-
External Reviewer, Hypatia, 2020-
External Reviewer, Lateral, 2020
External Reviewer, differences, 2019
External Reviewer, National Political Science Review, 2014
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COMMUNITY____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
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Board Member, Project Peaceful Warriors, New Orleans, LA, 2018-2022
Advisor to the Black Student Union, University of Bremen, 2017-2018
Graduate Student Advisor to the Black Student Union, UC Irvine, 2015-16
Political Action Advisor to the Black Student Union Demands Team, 2014-16
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LANGUAGES_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
English (fluent)
Amharic (native speaker)
German (reading)
Spanish (reading and speaking)