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Anthony Bogues

Harmon Family Professor

Professor of Africana Studies and Political Science

Anthony Bogues (Ph.D., 1994, Political Theory, University of the West Indies, Mona) is Professor of Africana Studies and Political Science, Royce Professor of Teaching Excellence (2004-2007); Harmon Family Professor and the current chair of the Department. His major research and writing interests are intellectual and cultural history, radical political thought, critical theory, Caribbean and African politics and literature.

Bogues is associate editor of the journal Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism and a member of the editorial collective of 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."

Selected Honors and Awards:

  • 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:

Books and edited volumes:

  • Exploring African and African Diasporic Knowledges (co-editor)(Pluto, 2008)
  • Empire of Liberty: Power, Imperial Freedom and Desire (University of New England Press, 2008)
  • 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)

Selected Articles:

Bogues is the author of over 40 published essays and articles on subjects ranging from the Haitian Revolution, to the complexities of African American political thought, the nature of freedom in the modern world and the relationship between critical political theory and the imagination. He has also lectured and written on the relationship between history and literature in Caribbean novels. In his teaching, he conducts independent reading courses on the writings of W.E.B. DuBois, Frantz Fanon, C.L.R. James, Giorgio Agamben, Michel Foucault, and Hannah Arendt. He is a series editor for the book series on Caribbean Thought, Caribbean Reasonings and an editor for the book series on Black critical thinkers.

Courses Taught

  • 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