R. A. Judy
- Professor
R.A.'s Affiliations: boundary 2, Center for African Studies, Islamicate Studies Working Group.
R. A. Judy is Professor of Critical and Cultural Studies in the Department of English at the University of Pittsburgh and is a member of the six-person Editorship of boundary 2 an international journal of literature and culture. The journal has published recent special issues critically engaging important topic, including Crisis to Catastrophe: Lineages of the Global New Right, as well as a Dossier: The Tunisian Revolution of Dignity. He is also a member of the Editorial Collective of CriticalProductive, a journal dedicated to the intellectual project of culture, arts and architecture, and on the Advisory Board of liquid blackness, an on-line journal that seeks to carve out a dedicated place for aesthetic theory and the most radical agenda of Black Studies to come together in productive ways; as well as on the Editorial Advisory board of Comparative Literature Studies.
Courses Taught
Undergraduate Courses Regularly Taught:
Global Black Literature
World Literature in English
Words and Images
Science Fiction
Graduate Seminars Conducted:
Black Critique and Black Radical Tradition
Frantz Fanon
W. E. B. Du Bois’s Critical Thought
Introduction to Islamicate Thinking
Critique of Humanism
Education & Training
- Al-Azhar University in the College of Arabic Language and Literature
- BA in Islamic philosophy and culture from the University of Minnesota in 1981
- PhD in comparative literature in 1990
Representative Publications
Books:
(Dis)forming the American Canon: The Vernacular of African Arabic American Slave Narrative (1992)
Sentient Flesh: Thinking in Disorder, Poiēsis in Black (2020).
Essays:
“The Mūthoi of Selahattin Demirtaş,” Comparative Literature Studies, vol. 61, no. 1 (February 2024)
“Always Thinking in Motion: An Interview with Anthony Bogues,” boundary 2, vol. 49:2 (May, 2022)
“The Unfungible Flow of Liquid Blackness” (Liquid Blackness: Journal of Aesthetics and Black Studies, May 2021)
“Restless Flying, A Black Study of Revolutionary Humanism,” boundary 2, vol.47:3 (August 2020)
“Dreaming About the Singularity of the New Middle Ages: Three Provisional Notes on the Question of Imagination,” (Critical Zone 3, 2009)
“Sayyid Qutb’s fiqh al- waqi‘i, or New Realist Science” (boundary 2, 2004)
“The New Black Aesthetic and W.E.B. Du Bois, or Hephaestus, Limping” (Massachusetts Review, 1994)
“The Question of Nigga Authenticity” (boundary 2, 1994)
“Kant and the Negro” (The Society for African Philosophy in North America, 1995)
Research Interests
Professor Judy’s research interests are focused on poetic socialities, Black study, Arabic and African philosophy, Islamicate thought, semiotics and critical theory.
