Biko Caruthers is a Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellow and Assistant Professor in the English Department at NYU. He received his PhD in Afro-American Studies from the University of Massachusetts Amherst with a certificate in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. He specializes in African American Literature and Black visual culture from the nineteenth century to the present, with an emphasis on Black critical theory, the “afterlives of slavery,” and Afropessimism. His other research interests and teaching interests include metaphors of race, comics, and contemporary Black art.
His current book project examines key conversations within critical Black studies that foreground questions about antiblackness, the category of the human, and the long durée of slavery. He argues that the Black child is one of the most important symbolic constructs of modernity. Indeed, it is through this construct that the Enlightenment concepts of Man and the Human coalesce and cohere. His project examines how Black cultural producers have deployed the figure of the Black child in order to critique the Enlightenment’s Man as well as the Human.
He teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on 19th Century African American Literature.