Virginia Thomas, Ph.D., is a scholar and teacher of race, gender, sexuality, and visuality in US culture and history. In Spring 2020, she was a Visiting Assistant Professor of American Studies at Brown University and in Fall, 2020, she began a postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Rice University. Her current book project tentatively titled, “Dark Trees: Lynching Aesthetics in Visual Grammars of Family,” examines the centrality of lynching aesthetics to white family visual rhetorics and to an environmentally-just aesthetics of Black world-making. Thomas holds a Ph.D. in American Studies and an M.A. in Public Humanities from Brown University.