MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale
Council on African Studies

Tav Nyong'o

William Lampson Professor of Theater Studies and American Studies and Professor of African American Studies, Theater and Performance Studies Program
Council on African Studies
Tavia Nyongo

Tavia Nyong’o is Professor of African American Studies, American Studies, and Theater Studies at Yale University. He works in contemporary aesthetic and critical theory with a particular attention to the visual, musical, and performative dimensions of blackness, as well as to the affective and technocultural dimensions of modern regimes of race. His first book, The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (Minnesota, 2009), won the Errol Hill Award for best book in African American theatre and performance studies. He is completing a study of fabulation in black aesthetics and embarking on another on queer wildness. Nyong’o has published in venues such as Radical History Review, Criticism, GLQ, TDR, Women & Performance, WSQ, The Nation, Triple Canopy, The New Inquiry, and n+1. He is co-editor of the Journal Social Text and the Sexual Cultures book series at New York University press. He regularly blogs at Bully Bloggers.