Robert Reid-Pharr


Robert Reid-Pharr is an American literary and cultural critic and professor.

Early life and education

A native North Carolinian, Reid-Pharr holds a B.A. in political science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and both an M.A. in African American studies and a Ph.D. in American studies from Yale University.

Career

In 2016 he was named a fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and visiting professor of gender and sexuality at Harvard University. In 2018, Reid-Pharr became Harvard's first professor of women, gender, and sexuality. His essays have appeared in Callaloo, Social Text, African American Review, American Literary History, AfterImage, Radical America, and American Literature. He has been a fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Bogliasco Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2015 he was inducted into the Johns Hopkins Society of Scholars.
Reid-Pharr has taught at the Graduate Center, CUNY, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Chicago, the University of Oregon, the University of Oxford, the American University of Beirut, Swarthmore College, and the College of William and Mary. His collection of essays Black, Gay, Man: Essays won the 2002 Randy Shilts Award for Best Gay Non-fiction given by the Publishing Triangle. His book Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, and the Black American Intellectual was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. He is also the author of Conjugal Union:The Body, the House, and the Black American ; and Archives of Flesh: African America, Spain, and Post-Humanist Critique for which he received an honorable mention for the 2017 William Sanders Scarborough Prize of the Modern Language Association.
He is considered a "queer public intellectual" who "attempts to write noncompliance with heteronormativity, and affirmation of other ways of being, into existence"

Selected bibliography