Alexander Ghedi Weheliye is a writer, professor, and curator focusing on Black Studies, critical theory, gender and sexuality studies, Black visual culture, social technologies, and popular culture. They are Malcolm S. Forbes Professor in the Department of Modern Culture and Media and the Brown Arts Institute at Brown University. They are the author of Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity (2005), which was awarded The Modern Language Association’s William Sanders Scarborough Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Study of Black American Literature or Culture, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (2014), and Feenin: R&B Music and the Materiality of BlackFem Voices and Technology (2023). As part of the Practicing Refusal Collective Weheliye is co-editor of Thinking from Black: A Lexicon. Currently, Weheliye is working on two projects. The first, Between Continents, is a critical memoir about their early life in East Germany and Somalia. The second, Schwarz-Sein: Elements of Black Life, reimagines the periodic table of elements from the vantage point of Black queer life. They are co-curator of the group exhibition, Exposure: Black Queer Visual Constellations at Cohen Gallery, Brown University (April-June 2026) and organizer of Exposure: Black Queer Visual Constellations: A Symposium (2026). Currently, they are president-elect of the American Studies Association.
Their work has been published in many journals, and the anthologies Black Europe and the African Diaspora, The Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music Studies, Wie Rassismus aus Wörtern spricht: (K)erben des Kolonialismus im Wissensarchiv deutsche Sprache, and re/visionen: Postkoloniale Perspektiven von People of Color auf Rassismus, Kulturpolitik und Widerstand in Deutschland
