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Anthony Bogues

Harmon Family Professor of Africana Studies

Anthony Bogues (Ph.D., 1994, Political Theory, University of the West Indies, Mona) is Professor of Africana Studies and Political Science, and affiliated faculty in the Department of Modern Culture and Media. Between 2004-2007, he was Royce Professor Teaching Excellence and is currently Harmon Family Professor. His major research and writing interests are intellectual and cultural history, radical political thought, critical theory, Caribbean and African politics and literature.

He is associate editor of the journal Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism and a member of the editorial collective of the journal boundary 2. He is also a visiting professor at The Centre of Caribbean Thought, University of the West Indies, Mona Campus and honorary professor at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. He is currently working on questions of power and its relationship to violence and death; the relationship of historical trauma to freedom; and the political aesthetics of Caribbean and African literature. He is convener of the international project “Exploring African and African Diasporic Knowledges”.

Professor Bogues is the author of over 50 published essays and articles on subjects ranging from the Haitian Revolution, the complexities of African American political thought, and the nature of freedom in the modern world to the relationship between critical political theory and the imagination. He has lectured and written on the relationship between history and literature in Caribbean novels. Professor Bogues conducts independent reading courses on the writings of W.E.B. DuBois, Frantz Fanon, C.L.R. James, Michel Foucault, and Hannah Arendt. He is a series editor for the book series on Caribbean Thought, Caribbean Reasonings. He also teaches graduate seminars for the Cogut Center for Humanities.

Selected Honors and Awards:

  • A.B. Mellon Visiting Fellow, University of Cape Town, May 2010
  • Cogut Humanities Faculty Fellow, 2010
  • Harmon Family Professor, Brown University
  • Honorary Professor, University of Cape Town
  • Freedman Humanities Lecturer, Dartmouth College - Spring 2007
  • Mellon Undergraduate Mentorship Award, 2007
  • Distinguished Fellow, Center for African Studies at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, 2006
  • Rhode Island Council for the Humanities for a project on African-American social theatre, 2005
  • Brown University Presidential Citation for Scholarship and Teaching, 2005
  • Royce Family Professorship in Teaching Excellence, Brown University, 2004
  • Visiting Professor of Intellectual History and Political Theory, University of the West Indies, November 2004
  • Middle Atlantic Writers Association (MAWA) Distinguished Writer Award, October 2003. (For non-fiction historical and political writing)
  • Barrett Hazeltine Citation for Excellence In Teaching, Brown University, 2002
  • Mellon Foundation Undergraduate Mentorship Award, Brown University, 2002
  • Wayland Fellow, Brown University, 2001-2002
  • Visiting Scholar at the Alice Berline Kaplan Center for Humanities, Northwestern University, for the series, "Race, Identity and Modernity" January 2001
  • Department of Government, University of the West Indies. Student Teaching Award for courses in African Politics, 1999
  • Monsignor Gladstone Wilson Excellence Award for Teaching at the University of the West Indies, Mona, 1999

Selected Publications

  • The George Lamming Reader: The Aesthetics of Decolonization, ed., (IRP, 2010)
  • Caribbean Thought and the Radical Imagination (2010)
  • Empire of Liberty: Power, Imperial Freedom and Desire (University of New England Press, 2010)
  • Caribbean Reasonings, After Man: Towards the Human Critical Essays on Sylvia Wynter ed., (IRP, 2006)
  • Black Heretics and Black Prophets: Radical Political Intellectuals (Routledge, 2003)
  • The Frame of the Nation ed., Special Issue of Small Axe(Indiana, 2002)
  • Aspects of the Caribbean Intellectual Tradition, ed., Special Issue of Small Axe, (University of West Indies Press, 1998)
  • Caliban's Freedom: The Early Political Thought of C. L. R. James (Pluto, 1997)

COURSES TAUGHT

  • And What About the Human?
  • Haiti: Revolution, Art, History and Politics
  • Comparative Revolutions of the 20th century
  • Race, Empire and Modernity
  • Rastafari
  • Freedom in Africana Political Thought
  • Africa and the West/The History of Ideas
  • History, Nation, Popular Culture and Caribbean Politics
  • Modern Caribbean History and Society
  • Thinking Africa Differently
  • Comparative Africana Literature